Existing studies on individual investors' decision-making often rely on observable socio-demographic variables to proxy for underlying psychological processes that drive investment choices. Doing so implicitly ignores the latent heterogeneity amongst investors in terms of their preferences and...

Many people believe the yield enhancement produced by covered options writing is the trading world's version of a free lunch. ...The writer of the call option agrees to sell a portion of the future upside appreciation of a long stock position; in exchange, the writer gains a one-time cash...

We develop a positive behavioral portfolio theory (BPT) and explore its implications for portfolio constrution and security design. The optimal portfolios of BPT investors resemble combinations of bonds and lotterly tickets consistent with Friedman and Savage's (1948) observation. We compare the...

This paper develops a capital asset pricing theory in a market where noise traders interact with information traders. Noise traders are traders who commit cognitive errors while information traders are free of cognitive errors. The theory includes the determination of the mean-variance efficient...

The paper makes four contributions. First, the paper provides new data and findings about credit card usage segmentation in respect to spending and borrowing behavior. Second, it sets the new findings against the backdrop of the newly emerging literature on financial literacy. A great...

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of behavioural finance. With the use of the latest psychological research, Shefrin helps us to understand the human behaviour that guides stock selection, financial services, and corporate financial strategy. He argues that financial practitioners...

We find that individual investors who use technical analysis and trade options frequently make poor portfolio decisions, resulting in dramatically lower returns than other investors. The data on which this claim is based consists of transaction records and matched survey responses of a sample of...