This paper investigates the motive of option trading. We show that option trading is mostly driven by differences of opinion, a finding different from the current literature that attempts to attribute option trading to information asymmetry. Our conclusion is based on three pieces of empirical...

We develop a model of asset trading with financial leverage in an economy with a continuum of investors. The investors are assumed to have diverse and rational beliefs in the sense of being compatible with observed data. We show that an increase in leverage ratio may cause the stock price to...

I introduce a novel proxy of investor sentiment and differences of opinion among trendchasing investors to forecast skewness in daily aggregate stock market returns. The new proxy is an easy-to-construct, real time measure available at different frequencies for more than a century. Empirically I...

In a production economy with trade in financial markets motivated by the desire to share labor-income risk and to speculate, we show that speculation increases volatility of asset returns and investment growth, increases the equity risk premium, and reduces welfare. Regulatory measures, such as...

Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors will trade more than rational investors. We directly test this hypothesis by correlating individual overconfidence scores with several measures of trading volume of individual investors (number of trades, turnover). Approximately 3,000...