Individual investors who hold common stocks directly pay a tremendous performance penalty for active trading. Of 66,465 households with accounts at a large discount broker during 1991 to 1996, those that trade most earn an annual return of 11.4 percent, while the market returns 17.9 percent. The average household earns an annual return of 16.4 percent, tilts its common stock investment toward high-beta, small, value stocks, and turns over 75 percent of its portfolio annually. Overconfidence can explain high trading levels and the resulting poor performance of individual investors. Our central message is that trading is hazardous to your wealth. The investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself. Benjamin Graham In 1996, approximately 47 percent of equity investments in the United States were held directly by households, 23 percent by pension funds, and 14 percent by mutual funds ~Securities Industry Fact Book, 1997!. Financial economists have extensively analyzed the return performance of equities managed by mutual funds. There is also a fair amount of research on the performance of equities managed by pension funds. Unfortunately, there is little research on the return performance of equities held directly by households, despite their large ownership of equities.

Theoretical models predict that overcon�dent investors trade excessively. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on gender. Psychological research demonstrates that, in areas such as �nance, men are more overcon�dent than women. Thus, theory predicts that men will trade more excessively than women. Using account data for over 35,000 households from a large discount brokerage, we analyze the common stock investments of men and women from February 1991 through January 1997. We document that men trade 45 percent more than women. Trading reduces men’s net returns by 2.65 percentage points a year as opposed to 1.72 percentage points for women. It’s not what a man don’t know that makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain’t so. Josh Billings, nineteenth century American humorist It is dif�cult to reconcile the volume of trading observed in equity markets with the trading needs of rational investors. Rational investors make periodic contributions and withdrawals

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Abstract: This paper is an investigation into the determinants of asymmetries in stock returns. We develop a series of cross-sectional regression specifications which attempt to forecast skewness in the daily returns of individual stocks. Negative skewness is most pronounced in stocks that have experienced: 1) an increase in trading volume relative to trend over the prior six months; and 2) positive returns over the prior thirty-six months. The first finding is consistent with the model of Hong and Stein (1999), which predicts that negative asymmetries are more likely to occur when there are large differences of opinion among investors. The latter finding fits with a number of theories, most notably Blanchard and Watson’s (1982) rendition of stockprice bubbles. Analogous results also obtain when we attempt to forecast the skewness of the aggregate stock market, though our statistical power in this case is limited.

We build a model that helps explain why increases in liquidity⎯such as lower bid-ask spreads, a lower price impact of trade, or higher turnover⎯predict lower subsequent returns in both firm-level and aggregate data. The model features a class of irrational investors, who underreact to the information contained in order flow, thereby boosting liquidity. In the presence of short-sales constraints, high liquidity is a symptom of the fact that the market is dominated by these irrational investors, and hence is overvalued. This theory can also explain how managers might successfully time the market for seasoned equity offerings, by simply following a rule of thumb that involves issuing when the SEO market is particularly liquid. Empirically, we find that: i) aggregate measures of equity issuance and share turnover are highly correlated; yet ii) in a multiple regression, both have incremental predictive power for future equal-weighted market returns.

Commercial banks frequently encounter optimistic entrepreneurs whose perceptions are biased by wishful thinking. Bankers are left with a difficult screening problem: separating realistic entrepreneurs from optimists who may be clever, knowledgeable, and completely sincere. We build a game-theoretic model of the screening process. We show that although entrepreneurs may practice self-restraint to signal realism, competition may lead banks to be insufficiently conservative in their lending, thus reducing capital-market efficiency. High collateral requirements decrease efficiency further. We discuss bank regulation and bankruptcy rules in connection with the problems that optimistic entrepreneurs present. 1.

∗This paper is an updated version of a previous working paper, “The Positive Role of Overconfidence and

We experimentally test overconfidence in investment decisions by offering participants the possibility to substitute their own for alternative investment choices.

This paper incorporates excess volatility in stock prices into a standard general equilibrium model and finds large welfare gains from stabilizing policies. Stock prices in this model aggregate information about fundamentals which is dispersed in the economy but also reflect excess volatility stemming from correlated distortions in beliefs. To solve the model, this paper develops a novel solution method for nonlinear models with dispersed information which can be applied to a large class of dynamic general equilibrium models. The innovation lies in a nonlinear change of variables which, when combined with perturbation methods, yields the nonlinear price function consistent with equilibrium expectation operators. The main positive result shows that dispersion of information allows arbitrarily small distortions in beliefs to generate large amounts of excess volatility and renders arbitrage infeasible. The government cannot observe whether a given stock price movement originates from information or noise. As a normative result, price stabilizing policies lead to a higher level of consumption: a fall in the risk premium lowers the marginal product of capital and raises the capital stock and production. History-dependent policies may improve the information content of prices and result in even higher welfare gains.

In this paper we use data from China’s stock markets to analyze non-fundamental components in stock prices. During the period 1993-2000, several dozen Chinese firms offered two classes of shares: class A, which could only be held by domestic investors, and class B, which could only be traded by foreigners. Despite their identical rights, A-share prices were on average 400 % higher than the corresponding B shares. We use a model of investor overconfidence (Scheinkman and Xiong (2003)) that produces correlations among prices, turnover, and volatility, to explain this premium. By adopting a panel regression method, we find that the turnover rate of A shares is able to explain 20 % of the cross-sectional variation in A-B share premium. We also conduct various specification analyses, and examine the relation between float, turnover rate, and volatility.