Purpose –Investors are now able to analyse more noise-free news to inform their trading decisions than ever before. Their expectation that more information means better performance is not supported by previous psychological experiments which argue that too much information actually impairs...

Karlsson, Loewenstein and Seppi (2009) found that, following market downswings, investors are less likely to login to monitor their retirement portfolios. They concluded that, rather like (apocryphal) ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, investors avoid unpleasant information by reducing...

Stock market investment decisions of individuals are positively correlated with that of co-workers. Sorting of unobservably similar individuals to the same workplaces is unlikely to explain our results, as evidenced by the investment behavior of individuals that move between plants. Purchases...

In this paper we investigate the influence of coupon structure on the financial behavior of Individual Investors in the fixed-income market. Examining circa 26 million decisions on 204 standard putable bonds with different coupon offerings our major findings are: (i) Products with a flat coupon...

In this study, we examine the differences in the factors perceived to be significant in the security selection process between novice and experienced investors. We apply the direct inquiry approach to two distinct groups: One group is composed of students enrolled in traditional face-to-face...

When determining a stock to buy, Strahilevitz et al. (2011) demonstrate that individual investors often repurchase a stock previously traded for a profit as a learning process. When evaluating a decision, people use the most available information that comes to mind. We posit that the most...

In this paper we study the repurchasing behavior of individual investors and identify several characteristics (stock- and investor-specific) that affect the preference for repurchasing stocks previously owned. Using a unique database of 5,128 individual investors trading from August 1st, 2003 to...

Japan's most powerful known earthquake struck at 2:46p.m. on Friday, March 11, 2011. We study the unusual trading behaviors of individual and foreign investors in Japan during the aftermath of this natural disaster. Individual investors typically show contrarian trading patterns, so the sharp...

We document economically large cross-sectional differences in the before- and after-fee returns earned by speculative traders by analyzing day traders in Taiwan from 1992 to 2006. We sort day traders based on their returns in year y and analyze their performance in year y+1; the 500 top-ranked...

We find that individual investors who use technical analysis and trade options frequently make poor portfolio decisions, resulting in dramatically lower returns than other investors. The data on which this claim is based consists of transaction records and matched survey responses of a sample of...