会议专题

Do Noise Traders Move Markets?

We study the trading behavior of individual investors using the Trade and Quotes (TAQ) and Institute for the Study of Security Markets (ISSM) transaction data over the period 1983 to 2001. We document three results: (1) Order imbalance based on buyer- and seller-initiated small trades from the TAQ/ISSM data correlate well with the order imbalance based on trades of individual investors from brokerage firm data. This indicates trade size is a reasonable proxy for the trading of individual investors. (2) Order imbalance based on TAQ/ISSM data indicate strong herding by individual investors. Individual investors predominantly buy (sell) the same stocks as each other contemporaneously. Furthermore, they predominantly buy (sell) the same stocks one week (month) as they did the previous week (month). (3) When measured over one year, the imbalance between purchases and sales of each stock by individual investors forecasts cross-sectional stock returns the subsequent year. Stocks heavily bought by individuals one year underperform stocks heavily sold by 4.4 percentage points in the following year. The spread in returns of stocks bought and stocks sold are greater for small stocks and stocks heavily traded by individual investors. Among stocks heavily traded by individual investors, the spread in returns between stocks bought and stocks sold is 13.5 percentage points the following year.

Brad M. Barber Terrance Odean Ning Zhu

Graduate School of Management, UC-Davis Haas School of Business, UC-Berkeley

国际会议

2005年中国金融国际年会

昆明

英文

1-39

2005-07-05(万方平台首次上网日期,不代表论文的发表时间)