This study reveals the information content of individual investors' risk-adjusted return expectations. Although individual investors overestimate the performance of their stock purchases on average, the cross-sectional variation in their risk-adjusted return expectations is predictive of future...

Our study suggests that despite the enforcement of insider trading laws, there are still some investors trading on their private information. Using account-level information, we show that some retail investors seem to be informed about particular stocks. When they sell short these stocks, they...

We examine how the presentation of investment results affects risk taking using an experiment in which participants view results either asset by asset or aggregated into a portfolio result. Our experiment examines the investment choices of a nationwide sample of 249 participants in a simulation...

This study examines how cognitive changes associated with aging impact the financial decision making capability of older Americans. We find that a decrease in cognition is associated with a decrease in financial literacy. Decreases in episodic memory and visuospatial ability are associated with...

We present empirical evidence of how prior outcomes affect individual investors' subsequent risk taking. Investors who experience big gains or big losses are likely to exit the stock market; however, investors remaining in the market increase their portfolio risk taking following losses. They...