This paper tests for the existence of performance persistence in brokerage house stock recommendations. For the period 1987-1996 we show that purchasing the current-year buy recommendations of the brokerage houses with the best prior performance earned an annualized geometric mean raw return of...

Theoretical models of financial markets built on the assumption that some investors are overconfident yield one central prediction: overconfident investors will trade too much. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on the basis of a variable that provides a natural proxy for...

In this paper we document that an investment strategy based on the consensus (average) analyst recommendations of security analysts earns positive returns. For the period 1986-1996, a portfolio of stocks most highly recommended by analysts earned an annualized geometric mean return of 18.8...

Using account data for over 60,000 households from a large discount brokerage firm, we analyze the common stock investment performance of individual investors from February 1991 through December 1996. The average household tilts their common stock investment toward high-beta, small, value...

Barber and Lyon (1996a) and Kothari and Warner (1996) document conventional tests of long-run abnormal returns are misspecified. In this research, we propose alternative methods to test for long-run abnormal returns. Our methods have two key characteristics. First, long-run abnormal returns are...

From January 1996 through June 2003, the average daily abnormal return to independent research firm buy recommendations exceeds that of investment bank buy recommendations by 3.1 basis points (almost 8 percentage points annualized). Investment bank buy recommendation underperformance is more...

This paper analyzes the distribution of stock ratings at investment banks and brokerage firms and examines whether these distributions can predict the profitability of analysts' recommendations. We document that the percentage of buys decreased steadily starting in mid-2000, likely due, at least...

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...