Short-Term Stock Price Reversals May Be Reversed

In present study, I explore intraday behavior of stock prices. In particular, I try to shed light on the dynamics of stock price reversals and namely, on the short-term character the latter may possess. For each of the stocks currently making up the Dow Jones Industrial Index, I calculate intraday upside and downside volatility measures, following Becker et al. (2008) and Klossner et al. (2012), as a proxy for reversed overreactions to good and bad news, respectively. I document that for all the stocks in the sample, mean daily returns following the days when a stock's upside volatility measure was higher or equal to its downside volatility measure are higher than following the days when the opposite relationship held, indicating that stock prices display a short-run 'reversals of reversals' behavior following corrected, or reversed, overreactions to news. Furthermore, I construct seven different portfolios built upon the idea of daily adjusting a long position in the stocks that according to 'reversals of reversals' behavior are expected to yield high daily returns, and a short position in the stocks, whose daily returns are expected to be low. All the portfolios yield significantly positive returns, providing an evidence for the practical applicability of the 'reversals of reversals' pattern in stock prices.