We examine institutional investor demand for stocks that are categorized as mispriced according to twelve well-known pricing anomalies. We find that institutional demand during the year prior to anomaly portfolio formation is typically on the wrong side of the anomalies' implied mispricing. That...

We examine institutional demand prior to well-known stock return anomalies and find that institutions have a strong tendency to buy stocks classified as overvalued (short leg of anomaly), and that these stocks have particularly negative ex-post abnormal returns. Our results differ from numerous...