Low risk and high return - how emotions shape expectations on the stock market

This experimental paper investigates the impact of emotions on risk and return estimates of stocks. Participants rate well-known blue-chip firms on an emotional scale and forecast risk and return of the firms' stock. We find that positive emotions lead to a prediction of high return and low risk, while negative emotions lead to a prediction of low return and high risk. This bias increases with participants' confidence in their ratings and decreases with financial literacy. We conclude that firms with a positive emotional appeal attract less financially literate and more emotional investors. In line with this conjecture, we find that firms that are rated very positively are held by a larger fraction of retail investors.