Using brokerage account data, we analyze the tax awareness of individual investors. We find strong evidence that taxes matter: investors prefer to locate bonds and mutual funds in retirement accounts and, in December, harvest stock losses in their taxable accounts. However, investors also trade...

In this paper we compare the investment decisions of groups (stock clubs) and individuals. Both individuals and clubs are more likely to purchase stocks that are associated with good reasons (e.g., a company that is featured on a list of most admired companies). However, stock clubs favor such...

The financial press makes frequent and bold claims regarding the performance of investment clubs. One oft quoted figure from a National Association of Investment Club survey states that 60 percent of investment clubs beat the market. Are these claims myth or reality?We analyze the common stock...

Individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading. Of 66,465 households with accounts at a large discount broker during 1991 to 1996, those that traded most earned an annual return of 11.4 percent, while the market returned 17.9 percent....

Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors trade excessively. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on gender. Psychological research demonstrates that, in areas such as finance, men are more overconfident than women. Thus, theory predicts that men will trade more...

We show the math gender gap is correlated with women's career outcomes using international geographic data on the investment profession, a math-intensive and 80% male profession. The math gender gap predicts the proportion of investment professionals who are women across countries and across...

Rational models claim “trading to learn” explains widespread excessive speculative trading and challenge behavioral explanations of excessive trading. We argue rational learning models do not explain speculative trading by studying day traders in Taiwan. Consistent with previous studies of...

Individual investor trading results in systematic and economically large losses. Using a complete trading history of all investors in Taiwan, we document that the aggregate portfolio of individuals suffers an annual performance penalty of 3.8 percentage points. Individual investor losses are...