Are Investors Reluctant to Realize Their Losses?

I test the disposition effect, the tendency of investors to hold losing investments too long and sell winning investments too soon, by analyzing trading records for 10,000 accounts at a large discount brokerage house. These investors demonstrate a strong preference for realizing winners rather than losers. Their behavior does not appear to be motivated by a desire to rebalance portfolios, or to avoid the higher trading costs of low priced stocks. Nor is it justified by subsequent portfolio performance. For taxable investments, it is suboptimal and leads to lower after-tax returns. Tax-motivated selling is most evident in December. THE TENDENCY TO HOLD LOSERS too long and sell winners too soon has been labeled the disposition effect by Shefrin and Statman ~1985!. For taxable investments the disposition effect predicts that people will behave quite differently than they would if they paid attention to tax consequences. To test the disposition effect, I obtained the trading records from 1987 through 1993 for 10,000 accounts at a large discount brokerage house. An analysis of these records shows that, overall, investors realize their gains more readily than their losses. The analysis also indicates that many investors engage in taxmotivated selling, especially in December. Alternative explanations have been proposed for why investors might realize their profitable investments while retaining their losing investments. Investors may rationally, or irrationally, believe that their current losers will in the future outperform their current * University of California, Davis. This paper is based on my dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank an anonymous referee, Brad Barber, Peter Klein, Hayne Leland, Richard Lyons, David Modest, John Nofsinger, James Poterba, Mark Rubinstein, Paul Ruud, Richard Sansing, Richard Thaler, Brett Trueman, and participants at the Berkeley Program in Finance, the NBER behavioral finance meeting, the Financial Management Association Conference, the American Finance Association meetings, and seminar participants at UC Berkeley, the Yale School of Management, the University of California, Davis, the University of Southern California, the University of North Carolina, Duke University, the Wharton School, Stanford University, the University of Oregon, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Amos Tuck School, the University of Chicago, the University of British Columbia, Northwestern University, the University of Texas, UCLA, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University for helpful comments. I would also like to thank Jeremy Evnine and especially the discount brokerage house that provided the data necessary for this study. Financial support from the Nasdaq Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. THE JOURNAL OF FINANCE • VOL. LIII, NO. 5 • OCTOBER 1998