This paper investigates characteristics of stocks individual investors prefer to buy and hold and their returns, and the relation between individual investor sentiment and stock returns.
The first part of this paper introduces the study which examine...
This paper investigates characteristics of stocks individual investors prefer to buy and hold and their returns, and the relation between individual investor sentiment and stock returns.
The first part of this paper introduces the study which examines the relationship between individual holdings and returns based on ownership data by type of investors uniquely available in the Korean stock market. Findings from this study can be summarized as the followings. First, Korean individual investors prefer stocks with small capitalization, low price, low profitability, high turnover, and low presence of foreign investors. Second, our analysis provides supportive evidence regarding the poor returns earned by individual investors. Stock returns of the portfolio with the highest small investor holdings was on average 2 percent lower each month compared to the lowest one in our examination of sized-adjusted returns and risk adjusted excess returns. We find evidence to suggest that amateur investors tend to lose more money in a bear market than they do during a market rally. Third, our analyses reveal that underperformance of amateur investors in the Korean stock market is attributable to uninformed stock-picking ability and contrarian trading strategy. This study provides supportive evidence to existing studies regarding the poor performance by individual investors due to their poor stock-picking skills owing to their lack of attention given to or misinterpretation of readily accessible information. Individual investors' contrarian trading strategy, buying low and selling high, is also to blame. Significance of this study can be explained in the following aspects. First, we investigate small individual investors whose equity ownership is less than 1 percent. Second, we put the number of floating shares instead of outstanding ones as denominator for calculating small investors’ stake. Third, we examine characteristics of stocks preferred by individual investors and their performance from both static and flow perspectives by using investor holdings data.
In the second part of the paper, we examine another research looked into the dynamic relations between investor sentiment and past, contemporaneous, and future stock returns in the Korean stock market. Specifically, we document the five followings. First, individual investor sentiment has no incremental power in explaining return co-movement for contemporaneous stock returns. Second, trades of lower retail concentration and lower arbitrage costs share a common directional component in return co-movements. Third, the existence of common directional component in return co-movements with low retail concentration could be a by-product of individual investors providing liquidity to other market participants. Fourth, returns - that of contemporaneous and past - are negatively correlated with individual investor sentiment. We find that retail investors follow contrarian investment strategies. Fifth, despite their lack of ability to predict future stock returns, individual investors seem to be compensated for the short-term by providing liquidity to other market participants for a certain type of stocks. Our second research suggests that individual investor sentiment has no incremental ability to explain stock return co-movements in the Korean stock market, and retail investors pursue contrarian investment strategies. Our findings also point to the lack of short-horizon predictability of individual investors in future stock returns, but they are compensated with short-horizon positive excess returns by providing liquidity to other market participants when it comes to a certain type of stocks. Significance of our study – that focuses on Korean stock market data - compared to most studies done previously can be explained in the following aspects. First, our analysis tests an extensive data set from the entire stock market, rather than a sampling of data from a couple of brokerage house, on individual investors who are indeed significant market participants, but often behave irrationally to continue to invest themselves when they end up losing money. Second, our analysis is based on real data classified by type of investors from the Korea Exchange, not assumption-based data in line with trading volume. Third, we extensively investigate the correlation between individual investor sentiment and return co-movements for contemporaneous stock returns, and specifically the dynamic relations between investor sentiment and past returns as well as their ability to predict future stock returns.
Keywords : individual investor, investment performance, corporate characteristics, trading behavior, investor sentiment, return predictability, Behavioral finance, Korean stock market