Rational investors should account for risk factor exposure when allocating capital to mutual funds. Two recent influential studies use mutual fund flows to test whether investors distinguish between performance driven by managers' skill and systematic risk factors. Both studies found that...

Using a novel database, we show that the stock-price impact of analyst trade ideas is at least as large as the impact of stock recommendation, target price, and earnings forecast changes, and that investors following trade ideas can earn significant abnormal returns. Trade ideas triggered by...

We first provide evidence of some retail investors taking real trading (selling) decisions which are clearly sub-optimal even from an ex-ante perspective. We then show that these investors also exhibit stronger investment biases, namely, the disposition effect, underdiversification, preference...

Over two decades, ETFs have become one of the most popular investment vehicle among retail and professional investors due to their low transaction costs and high liquidity, taking market share from traditional investment vehicles such as mutual funds and index futures. Research has shown that in...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

Sentiment should exhibit its strongest effects on asset prices at times when valuations are most subjective. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that a one-standard-deviation increase in aggregate uncertainty amplifies the predictive ability of sentiment for market returns by two to four...

Motivated by the evidence that investors tend to be overly optimistic about low-priced stocks, we examine how nominal price affects the cross section of stock returns. To circumvent the mechanical inverse relationship between price and expected return, we construct a novel way of examining the...

Long-short anomaly returns are strongly related to the day of the week. Anomalies for which the speculative leg is the short (long) leg experience the highest (lowest) returns on Monday. The opposite pattern is observed on Fridays. The effects are large; Monday (Friday) alone accounts for over...

The anomalies literature is infested with widespread p-hacking. We replicate this literature by compiling a large data library with 447 anomalies. With microcaps alleviated via NYSE breakpoints and value-weighted returns, 286 anomalies (64%) including 95 out of 102 liquidity variables (93%) are...

Hedge funds significantly reduced their equity holdings during the recent financial crisis. In 2008Q3-Q4, hedge funds sold about 29% of their aggregate portfolio. Redemptions and margin calls were the primary drivers of selloffs. Consistent with forced deleveraging, the selloffs took place in...