Psychology considers self-control failure, i.e., the inability to resist certain behaviors and impulses when seeking to achieve future goals as a major human pathology. The finance literature models and applies self-control failure to explain time-inconsistent behavior such as under-saving and...

We show that conditional skewness and kurtosis of the momentum strategy are highly time-varying and sometimes take extreme values or may even not exist. The high negative skewness and high kurtosis arise since the winners' and losers' skewness moves in opposite directions, whereas the kurtosis...

Does the disposition effect appear in bond trades as in stocks?. We apply the Odean's measure (1998) to a proprietary transaction database with unique investor ids from an emerging market exchange that holds both stock and bond trading. We find some disposition effect in treasuries, but much...

Investors and traders typically use the Relative Strength Index (RSI) to find signals that help identify turning points in security prices. This strategy, however, discounts the true nature of the indicator and limits its potential. A breakdown of the RSI formula reveals that its power lies in...

We propose a new class of investable momentum and contrarian stock-market indices that partition a benchmark index, such as the Russell 1000. Our momentum indices overweight stocks that have recently outperformed, while our contrarian indices underweight these same stocks. Our index construction...

We construct a momentum factor that identifies cross-sectional winners and losers based on a weighting scheme that incorporates all the price data, over the entire lookback period, as opposed to only the first and last price points of the window. The weighting scheme is derived from the...

We provide an overview of research on the stock trading behavior of individual investors. This research documents that individual investors (1) underperform standard benchmarks (e.g. a low-cost index fund), (2) sell winning investments while holding losing investments (the “disposition...

Using a large panel of U.S. brokerage accounts trades and positions, we show that a large fraction of retail investors trade as contrarians after large earnings surprises, especially for loser stocks, and that such contrarian trading contributes to post earnings announcement drift (PEAD) and...

We find evidence that hedge funds significantly manipulate stock prices on critical reporting dates. We document that stocks held by hedge funds experience higher returns on the last day of the quarter, followed by a reversal the next day. For example, the stocks in the top quartile of hedge...