Investors are not all alike and neither is their sentiment. The sentiment of Wall Street strategists is unrelated to the sentiment of individual investors or that of newsletter writers although the sentiment of the last two groups is closely related. Sentiment can be useful for tactical asset allocation. There is a negative relationship between the sentiment of each of the three groups and futu...

Many investors seek income for its consistency and ability to dampen volatility. High-quality fixed income securities historically provided investors with a reasonable income stream, but since the 2008 financial crisis, global economic conditions and central bank policies have caused yields to fall to historic lows. To realize even modest income levels, investors may need to consider assuming m...

Financial crises are supposed to be rare events, yet they occur quite often. According to Reinhart and Rogoff (2009), investors suffer from “this time is different” syndrome, failing to see crises coming because they do not recognize similarities among the different pre-crisis bubbles. As a result, each crisis surprises investors. Economists typically model financial crises as responses to shoc...

This paper examines, in a high technology context, how investor and investee behave, and interact, in the face of risk. The evidence on which it is based was obtained by fieldwork methods, over the period 2000-2, examining a sample of UK investors and investees active in high technology areas. The paper focuses on four questions: how risky are investments; what affects risk most; what aspects o...

People are more willing to bet on their own judgments when they feel skillful or knowledgeable (Heath and Tversky, 1991). We investigate whether this ‘competence effect’ influences trading frequency and home bias. We find that investors who feel competent trade more often and have more internationally diversified portfolios. We also find that male investors, and investors with larger portfolios...

This paper examines how high-frequency trading decisions of individual investors are influenced by past price changes. Specifically, we address the question as to whether decisions to open or close a position are different when investors already hold a position compared to when they don’t. Based on a unique dataset from an electronic foreign exchange trading platform, OANDA FXTrade, we find tha...

We present a theory of excess stock market volatility, in which market movements are due to trades by very large institutional investors in relatively illiquid markets. Such trades generate significant spikes in returns and volume, even in the absence of important news about fundamentals. We derive the optimal trading behavior of these investors, which allows us to provide a unified explanation...