Using the number of Robinhood users holding a firm’s shares, I examine how novice retail investors respond to earnings announcements and the implications of their responses for the price-earnings relation. I do not find evidence of informed trading among these investors. Changes in their...

We directly compare retail investor execution costs with exchange execution costs. We find off-exchange retail trades execute at lower effective spreads than comparable exchange trades, primarily due to the uninformed nature of retail trades. These results hold when payment for order flow (PFOF)...

We show retail investors are highly responsive to changes in trading commission fees. Using a triple-difference research design around the removal of fees for retail investors on the international retail broker platform, eToro, we show investors responded by trading approximately 30% more...

We investigate the role of retail traders in comovement in return and liquidity. We use the Robinhood data to compute a proxy of retail trading activity. Results show that retail trading activity is associated with a decrease in both comovements in return and liquidity. The effects on comovement...

We study the trading behavior of retail investors in the market of leveraged bank-issued retail derivatives designed to trade excessively, speculate and gamble on ongoing trends and market movements. We analyze whether retail investors have private information and benefit disproportionately or...

Economic theory suggests that speculative trading can lead to instability in financial markets. Using a novel dataset on retail trading activity in the US, this study extends the literature and investigates the impact of retail (speculative) trading on the volatility of the financial markets...

This paper uses regulatory data to assess the value of retail order flow in the German equity market. To this end, we examine the performance of specialized retail market makers (RMMs) that internalize a large share of retail activity via affiliated trading venues. We show that retail market...

We compare execution quality of six brokerage accounts across five brokers by generating a sample of 85,000 simultaneous market orders. Commission levels and payment for order flow (PFOF) differ across our accounts. We find that execution prices vary significantly across brokers: the mean...

In this study, we use daily trading data to investigate the performance of institutional investors in the Chinese stock market, which is dominated by retail investors. We find that stocks with intense institutional net buying significantly outperform those with intense institutional net selling...

Monthly momentum returns increase monotonically across quintile portfolios of stocks sorted by retail trading participation with a top-minus-bottom spread of 1.42% (t-statistics = 3.46). Stocks that are heavily traded by retail investors exhibit lottery-like features such as low prices, high...