We investigate the dual notions that “dumb money” exacerbates well-known stock return anomalies, and “smart money” attenuates these anomalies. We find that aggregate flows to mutual funds (“dumb money”) appear to exacerbate cross-sectional mispricing, particularly for growth,...

Return reversals depend on de facto market making by active informed investors as well as uninformed market makers. Accordingly, we find that reversals are higher following declines in the number of active institutional investors. Price declines over the past quarter, which serve as a proxy for...

In this paper, we shed light on short-horizon return reversals. We show theoretically that a risk-based rationale for reversals implies a relation between returns and past order flow, whereas a reversion in beliefs of biased agents does not do so. The empirical results indicate that returns are...

Daily returns for stocks listed on the New York Exchange (NYSE) are not serially dependent. In contrast, order imbalances on the same stocks are highly persistent from day to day. These two empirical facts can be reconciled if sophisticated investors react to order imbalances within the trading...

This paper studies the relation between order imbalances and daily returns of individual stocks. Our tests are motivated by a theoretical framework, whose distinguishing feature is that it explicitly considers how market makers with inventory concerns dynamically accommodate autocorrelated...

When the imminence of news announcements is not public knowledge, many traders will lack information on both the mean and variance of private information. Our analysis of such a setting in both single and multi-security contexts implies that disclosure of impending information events by firms...

High levels of turnover in financial markets are consistent with the notion that trading, like gambling, yields direct utility to some agents. We show that the presence of these agents attenuates covariance risk pricing and volatility, and implies a negative relation between volume and future...

The security market line (SML) accords with the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) by taking on an upward slope in pessimistic sentiment periods, but is downward sloping during optimistic periods. We hypothesize that this finding obtains because periods of optimism attract equity investment by...

This paper sheds empirical light on whether sentiment affects the profitability of price momentum strategies. We hypothesize that news that contradicts investors' sentiment causes cognitive dissonance, which slows the diffusion of signals that oppose the direction of sentiment. This phenomenon...

We develop a model where overconfident investors overestimate their own signal quality but are skeptical of others'. Those investors who are initially uninformed believe that the early informed have learned little, leading the former investors to provide excess liquidity, which, in turn, causes...