ABSTRACT
This paper explores the link between personal experience with COVID-19 and US retail investors' financial decision-making during the first COVID-19 wave. Do retail investors that have personally experienced COVID-19 change their investments after the pandemic outbreak, and if so, why? We use a cross-sectional dataset from an online survey of US retail investors collected in July and August 2020 to assess if and how respondents change their investment decisions after the COVID-19 outbreak. On average retail investors increase their investments during the first wave of COVID-19 by 4.7%, while many of them decrease their investments suggesting a high heterogeneity of investor behaviours. We provide the first evidence that personal experience with the virus can have unexpected positive effects on retail investments. Investors who have personal experience with COVID-19, who are in a vulnerable health category, who tested positive, and who know someone in their close circle of friends or family who died because of COVID-19, increase their investments by 12%. We explain our findings through terror management theory, salience theory and optimism bias, suggesting that reminders of mortality, focussing on selective salient investment information, and over-optimism despite personal vulnerable health contribute to the increase in retail investments. Increased levels of savings, saving goals and risk capacity are also positively associated with increased investments. Our findings are relevant to investors, regulators, and financial advisors, and highlight the importance of providing retail investors with access to investment opportunities in periods of unprecedented shocks such as COVID-19.
ABSTRACT
Retail investors show gambling preferences and pay greater attention to the market than individual stocks. Previous studies report a positive and significant relationship between market attention and volatility. This relationship results from the joint effects of attention to investment-motivated and gambling-motivated components. However, the separate roles of these two components have not yet been examined. Hence, this study applied principal component analysis to identify the gambling-motivated component from market attention and gambling-related variables. The investment-motivated component is the regression residual of the market's attention paid to the gambling-motivated component. This study linearly relates these two components to volatility. The generalized method of moments regression was used to resolve endogeneity problems and biased estimates. The Google search volume index is a proxy for unobserved retail investors' market attention. Using a daily sample of the Thai market from August 6, 2008, to September 30, 2022 (a total of 3,450 observations), this study found a positive relationship between market attention and stock market volatility. This relationship results from the positive effects of both investment-motivated and gambling-motivated components. Attention to gambling is more influential than attention to investment. The explanatory powers of gambling-attention and investment-attention for volatility were 81.33% and 18.67%, respectively. These effects were less pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 Pandemic has increased the attention paid to money market funds. Using Covid-19 cases and a measure of lockdowns, shutdowns, etc., we analyze if money market fund investors and managers responded to the intensity of the pandemic. We ask whether or not the Federal Reserve implementation of the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility (MMLF) had an effect on market participant behavior. We find that institutional prime investors responded significantly to the MMLF. Fund managers responded to the intensity of the pandemic but largely ignored the reduction in uncertainty created by the implementation of the MMLF.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, retail trading in stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets has become significantly more popular, and since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift to a work-from-home regime, it has in many ways become a mainstream activity. In this dissertation, I utilize a proprietary dataset obtained from an international broker to produce new insights about the behavior and performance of this important group of traders.In the first essay, I study the use of leverage by retail traders. Utilizing a major regulatory intervention that limited the amount of leverage that retail brokers may offer on certain financial derivatives, I deploy a difference-in-differences research design and report that leverage is highly detrimental to the wealth of retail traders. I further show that overconfidence and an insufficient understanding of leverage are important contributors to this result. These findings portray a situation in which retail traders make a financial mistake that is so extreme that it may justify a regulatory intervention even in the absence of an apparent market failure.In the second essay, I investigate the implications of the recent shift to a work-from-home regime on retail trading. Exploiting the changes in work-from-home policies within and across countries, I demonstrate that, upon working from home, retail traders pay more attention to their brokerage accounts, trade more and perform better. These findings not only illustrate important changes in the behavior of retail traders but also provide causal support for the literature aiming to link traders' attention to their performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
Purpose The last two years are characterized by record numbers of initial public offerings (IPOs), foreign investor abstinence and rising retail investor appetite in the Turkish stock market. This study aims to investigate whether retail investor dominance coupled with foreign investor aversion has significant impact on initial and short-term returns. Design/methodology/approach The research covers the population of 188 companies going public at Borsa Istanbul from 2010 to the end of 2021. Three hypotheses are developed and tested by means of ordinary least squares and Tobit regressions to examine the association between investor allocations and returns. A new measure for retail investor trade size, average retail investment per capita (ARI) is utilized to explain the linkage between retail investor appetite and short-term returns. Two-stage least squares and Heckman selection regressions are employed for robustness tests to address potential endogeneity. Findings Pandemic IPOs provide significantly larger short-term returns than pre-pandemic IPOs measured up to one month. Underpricing during the pandemic is not significantly greater due to 10% daily price limit, which leads to a gradual release of retail investor appetite and increase in stock prices in the short term. Retail investors control 66% of the market during the pandemic compared to 35% before, while foreign institutional investor market share declines from 53% to 6%. Average retail investor number in an offering increases by 55.4-fold during the pandemic, resulting in substantially smaller allocations to the average individual investor. Greater returns during the pandemic are associated with smaller retail investment per capita, while domestic institutional investment is associated with lower returns as typically expected from institutional investors, although its significance disappears after controlling for potential endogeneity. Research limitations/implications This study investigates returns up to one month. To better understand whether short-termism of retail investors and recent foreign investor aversion have detrimental effect on companies, and on the market as a whole, longer-term studies are needed. This is not possible at the current stage since not enough time has passed. Practical implications This research is relevant to emerging market investors and companies due to the ongoing foreign investor aversion and fast-changing market conditions. The research cautions market participants against the short-termism of retail investors and urges policymakers to regain investors with longer investment horizons. Social implications Many newcomer retail investors are in the stock market due to lack of more profitable alternatives in Turkey. Although their participation is accompanied by larger short-term returns for the time being, the current momentum is unlikely to last long as the pandemic ends, and interest rates around the world begin to be raised. The study urges small investors to invest in a more informed manner and aim for longer time horizons, as it may not be possible to make a quick profit in the stock markets in the near future. Originality/value This is the first study to investigate changing investor profile in emerging markets and its impact on returns following pandemic declaration. The question is important because the investor composition affects the investment horizon in the market.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, retail trading in stocks, cryptocurrencies and other assets has become significantly more popular, and since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the shift to a work-from-home regime, it has in many ways become a mainstream activity. In this dissertation, I utilize a proprietary dataset obtained from an international broker to produce new insights about the behavior and performance of this important group of traders.In the first essay, I study the use of leverage by retail traders. Utilizing a major regulatory intervention that limited the amount of leverage that retail brokers may offer on certain financial derivatives, I deploy a difference-in-differences research design and report that leverage is highly detrimental to the wealth of retail traders. I further show that overconfidence and an insufficient understanding of leverage are important contributors to this result. These findings portray a situation in which retail traders make a financial mistake that is so extreme that it may justify a regulatory intervention even in the absence of an apparent market failure.In the second essay, I investigate the implications of the recent shift to a work-from-home regime on retail trading. Exploiting the changes in work-from-home policies within and across countries, I demonstrate that, upon working from home, retail traders pay more attention to their brokerage accounts, trade more and perform better. These findings not only illustrate important changes in the behavior of retail traders but also provide causal support for the literature aiming to link traders' attention to their performance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
This study investigates the impact of Robinhood investors' participation on the volatility of American depository receipts (ADRs). Using data on Robinhood account holdings in 382 ADRs from 33 countries around the globe, we show that their activity amplifies the cross-listed securities volatility. While Robinhood investors' involvement has soared in recent years, seemingly supplying additional trading liquidity, this provision appears to be associated with a deterioration of ADR stability. The detrimental effect holds across the COVID-19 period and is not subsumed by home-country pandemic intensity measures. Since the law of one price suggests that increased ADR volatility will negatively impact the underlying stocks in their home markets, our results have important implications for various government and market policy makers as well as for home-country firms considering cross-listing their stocks.
ABSTRACT
With the emergence of COVID-19, the end of 2019 witnessed worldwide crises causing immense harm to human life. The virus that emerged from China at the end of the year 2019 soon spread to almost all the world economies with negative effects getting amplified each passing day. To combat the rapid spread of the virus and meet the rising medical needs the various governments imposed complete to restricted lockdown. Though the lockdown to an extent helped control the spread of the deadly virus, it also affected the economies severely. The unstable financial system, lack of earnings and limited savings brought a noticeable change in the financial attitude of the retail investors and hence, the emergence of COVID-19 opened up new areas of academic research in the field of financial management behaviour. Considering the novelty of the subject, this paper seeks to examine the impact of financial attitude and financial management behaviour of retail investors during the pandemic. To meet the objectives, the data were collected from a sample of 325 Delhi-NCR based retail investors. Structural Equation Modeling has been used to study the relationship amongst the identified variables. The findings enrich our understanding of retail investment behaviour. © 2021. Transnational Press London. All Rights Reserved.
ABSTRACT
How do retail investors respond to the outbreak of COVID-19? We use transaction-level trading data to show that investors significantly increase their trading activities as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, both at the extensive and at the intensive margin. Investors, on average, increase their brokerage deposits and open more new accounts. The average weekly trading intensity increases by 13.9% as the number of COVID-19 cases doubles. The increase in trading is especially pronounced for male and older investors, and affects stock and index trading. Following the 9.99%-drop of the Dow Jones on March 12, investors significantly reduce the usage of leverage.