Using proprietary data on millions of trades by retail investors, we provide the first large-scale evidence that retail short selling predicts negative stock returns. A portfolio that mimics weekly retail shorting earns an annualized risk-adjusted return of 9%. The predictive ability of retail...

We identify all return leader-follower pairs among individual stocks using Granger causality regressions. Thus-identified leaders can reliably predict their followers' returns out of sample, and the return predictability works at the level of individual stocks rather than industries. Our results...

A great number of academic papers evaluate the potential for incentive-driven bias in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. Yet bias does not necessarily invalidate a forecast, nor does it impinge on its relative quality. We find that analysts' forecasts are optimistic relative to recently...

Warren Buffett suggested that the ratio of the market value of all publicly traded stocks to the Gross National Product could identify potential overvaluations and undervaluations in the US equity market. We investigate whether this ratio is a statistically significant predictor of equity market...

This paper analyzes empirically the relation between financial analysts' recommendation profitability and their forecast accuracy and shows that contrary to intuition the group of most successful recommendations is not associated with the highest accuracy on average. The finding that best...

We show that news stories contain information about economic linkages between firms and document that information diffuses slowly across linked stocks. Specifically, we identify linked stocks from co-mentions in news stories and find that linked stocks cross-predict one another's returns in the...

In this paper, we extend the literature on crash prediction models in three main ways. First, we explicitly relate crash prediction measures and asset pricing models. Second, we present a simple, effective statistical significance test for crash prediction models. Finally, we propose a...

Data on individual trades in prediction markets relating to the 2008 and 2012 US Presidential elections reveal that traders vary enormously in their behavior. This contrasts with the standard prediction-market models, which assume relatively homogeneous participants who differ only in their...

Regulators are not always able to anticipate how mandates will translate to financial reporting practice, particularly when managers are able to exercise reporting discretion. When XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language, was mandated by the SEC, financial analysts were among the...