We estimate a realistic process for noise trading to help theorists calibrate their models. For this purpose we characterize the trades executed by individual investors, who are natural candidates for the role of noise traders because their trades are (on average) cross-correlated, loss making, and weakly correlated with stocks’ future fundamentals. We use transactions data from a retail broker...

Motivated by previous findings that discretization of financial time series can effectively filter the data and reduce the noise, this experimental study, performed in a realistic setting of trading straddles via predicting volatility, compares trading performances of symbol-based models with those of probabilistic models operating on real-valued sequences. We show that carefully designed proba...

This paper investigates the optimal dynamic investment for an investor who maximizes constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) utility in a discrete-time market with a riskfree bond and a risky stock. The risky stock is assumed to present both the dividend risk and the price risk. With our assumptions, the dividend risk is equivalent to fundamental risk, and the price risk is equivalent to the noi...

We consider Kyle’s market order model of insider trading with multiple informed traders and show: if a linear equilibrium exists for two different numbers of informed traders, asset payoff and noise trading are independent and have finite second moments, then these random variables are normally distributed. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C62, D82, G14.

I investigate the impact of noise trading on securities market efficiency using data from short-horizon Arrow-Debreu securities traded on an online exchange. Using liquidity as a proxy for the amount of noise trading, I show that securities markets with persistently high noise trade exhibit significant pricing anomalies, such as overpricing low probability events and underpricing high probabili...

Conventional wisdom suggests that investors’ independent biases should cancel each other out and have little impact on equilibrium at the aggregate level. In contrast to this intuition, this paper analyzes models with biased investors and finds that biases often have a significant impact on the equilibrium even if they are independent across investors. First, independent biases affect the equil...

Spontaneous activation of rhodopsin without light absorption occurs at a much lower rate in rod photoreceptors and insect rhabdoms than in cones. The difference lies in the pigment molecules themselves, and has implications for the design of visual photoreceptors.

Previous research suggests that individual investor sentiment has incremental explanatory power for returns of small cap stocks, value stocks, stocks with low institutional ownership, and stocks with lower prices (Kumar and Lee (2003)) and that there is a strong link between institutional sentiment and the returns of large stocks (Brown and Cliff (2004)). With respect to return volatility, Jack...

This paper provides a micro foundation for the behavior assumptions as well as outcomes in noisy rational expectations equilibrium models. If there are gains from trade, and all agents are rational and can acquire costly information, then equilibria in double auction markets may have the following properties. (i) Ex ante identically informed agents evolve endogenously to noise traders, speculat...