Do Investors Overpay for Stocks with Lottery-Like Payoffs? An Examination of the Returns on OTC Stocks

We study returns on Over-The-Counter stocks and we find these returns are extremely negative on average. The distribution of OTC stock returns is highly positively-skewed: while many of the stocks in our sample become worthless, a few do extremely well. We investigate whether this negative return premium can be rationalized by investors' preference for positively-skewed payoffs. We show that the equilibrium model of Barberis and Huang (2008) provides a plausible explanation for the negative returns. We also show that OTC stocks that once traded on the regular exchanges perform much better than stocks that originate in the OTC markets