An important element of a firm's disclosure strategy is the timing of its mandatory public announcements. In this article, two aspects of disclosure timing are examined. The first is the intraday timing of earnings accouncements. It is demonstrated here that, under reasonable conditions, market...

The use of analyst forecasts as proxies for investors' earnings expectations is commonplace in empirical research. An implicit assumption behind their use is that they reflect analysts' private information in an unbiased manner. As demonstrated here, this assumption is not necessarily valid....

We study the trading of individual investors using transaction data and identifying buyer- or seller-initiated trades. We document four results: (1) Small trade order imbalance correlates well with order imbalance based on trades from retail brokers. (2) Individual investors herd. (3) When...

We test and confirm the hypothesis that individual investors are net buyers of attention-grabbing stocks, e.g., stocks in the news, stocks experiencing high abnormal trading volume, and stocks with extreme one-day returns. Attention-driven buying results from the difficulty that investors have...

We analyze 1,607 investors who switched from phone-based to online trading during the 1990s. Those who switch to online trading perform well prior to going online, beating the market by more than 2% annually. After going online, they trade more actively, more speculatively, and less profitably...

Individual investor trading results in systematic and economically large losses. Using a complete trading history of all investors in Taiwan, we document that the aggregate portfolio of individuals suffers an annual performance penalty of 3.8 percentage points. Individual investor losses are...