We build an original market sentiment index based solely on changes over time in the number of different stocks held by individual investors. No prices, returns or trading volumes enter the definition. As a consequence, our index is not contaminated by liquidity concerns present in measures...

We build a new measure of investor sentiment only based on changes in diversification levels of individual investors' portfolios. The dynamics of the number of different stocks in portfolios is modelized as a Markov chain. We measure investor sentiment as the area above the cumulative...

In a recent article entitled 'Putting Risk in its Proper Place,' Eeckhoudt and Schlesinger (2006) established a theorem linking the sign of the n-th derivative of an agent's utility function to her preferences among pairs of simple lotteries. We characterize these lotteries and show that, in a...