Overreaction and Availability Bias: Analysis of Real Estate Sector’s Stock Prices and Investors’ Reaction during Demonetisation in India

The stock market is full of events that affect the sensitivity reaction of investors at a large scale. Individual investor sentiment is just like his/her personal feeling depending upon their nature, risk appetite, and market scenario. This research study investigates the investors’ reaction in the stock market for the real estate segment during the massive market crisis in developing countries. Demonetisation of 2016 in India has been taken with the purpose of implementing a pilot study to analyse the overreaction and availability bias. The primary focus was on analysing how the investors react on the information of demonetisation and their pattern of investment in the stock market with a special emphasis on real estate sector where the effect of the event had dramatically changed the stock prices. Therefore, a pre- and post- analysis had been conducted to gauge the prices, sensitivity, and reaction of investors in the stock market. The reaction of the citizens after these events was found to be drastically affected. Five real estate companies had been focused upon in this study to examine the impact of investors’ overreaction owing to the demonetisation and their investment pattern for stocks during pre- and post- demonetisation period at that timeframe. The analysis was done on a shorter period of time so that the impact of overreaction and availability bias can be critically analysed. The paper thus exhibits how investor sentiments and reaction for stock preference had changed over time through statistical study.

Can investors profit by utilizing technical trading strategies?Evidence from the Korean and Chinese stock markets

The idea of this study is derived from observing the profitability of stock investments following the phenomena of continuously rising(or falling)prices of stocks and continuously overbought(or oversold)signals emitted by technical indicators.We employ the standard event study approach and technical trading strategies to explore whether investors would exploit profits in trading the constituent stocks of the Korea Composite Stock Price Index 50 and Shanghai Stock Exchange 50 when the aforementioned continuous phenomena occur.We find that both the Korean and Chinese stock markets are not fully efficient;this finding may enhance the robustness of the existing literature.In addition,we reveal that contrarian strategies are appropriate for the trading stocks listed on the Korean stock market for all the cases investigated in this study.However,momentum strategies are appropriate for the Chinese stock market when continuously rising stock prices and overbought signals are simultaneously observed.These findings imply that the difference in investor behaviors between the Korean and Chinese stock markets might result in dissimilar trading strategies being employed for these two markets.

Test for Investor Rationality for Companies Listed at the Nairobi Stock Exchange

Investors have traditionally been viewed as economically rational individuals who make decisions based on all available information. They have been assumed to use probability functions to arrive at the most optimal decision. More recent studies propose that investors are irrational and systematically overreact to good and bad information events. The concept of the rational investor has been supported by among others Efficient Market Hypothesis and Modem Portfolio Theory. Other studies opposed to the notion of rational investors have identified psychological biases that influence decision making process of an investor, and leading them to make irrational decisions. Several anomalies have been identified that deviate from rational behavior. The objective of this paper was to test for investor rationality for companies listed at the Nairobi Stock Exchange. This paper tested overreaction by investors to news and performance of companies listed at the Nairobi Stock Market as an anomaly that has been proven in other markets. The test involved forming companies into two portfolios, one of extreme good performers and the other of extreme poor performers during the base year. Performance of these portfolios was analyzed for a nine year period from the year of portfolio formation. The results are consistent with the notion of overreaction, showing that investors overreact to both good and bad news. Over the study period the loser portfolio outperformed the winner portfolio by about 35.92%. This confrere that investors are irrational and make decisions based on some biases.

Analysis on the Psychology and Behavior of Individual Investors under the Influence of COVID-19

Due to the relatively short history of the development of the Chinese stock market,the investment philosophy and psychology of most individual investors are not particularly mature.Especially under the influence of public health emergencies,the individual investors’characteristic of the investment behavior in the stock market has become more obvious.This paper combines questionnaire and psychological experiments to study the factors that affect investment decisions of individual investors,and then takes COVID-19 as an example to analyze the impact of public emergencies on individual investors’investment decisions in the stock market.

Noise, Asset Prices, and Bubbles

The paper asserts that the misperceptions of noise traders are a behavioral bias characterized by overreactions. By introducing the overreaction coefficient, we provide an explanation for the volatility of asset prices and bubbles in a simplified framework that is similar to the DSSW （1990a） model. When the underlying asset is involved with a fundamental shock, noise traders will generally overreact to it, which creates an ＂overreaction risk＂. This kind of risk will make the asset prices more volatile, and even make up asset bubbles. Therefore, asset bubbles can be regarded as a psychological phenomenon, and are actually the results of the psychological changing process of noise traders.

How does China’s stock market react to the announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown?

In this paper,we study how China’s stock market reacts to the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020,particularly to the announcement of the pandemic lockdown.In general,we observe reversals both at the industry level and at the firm level due to investors’overreactions to the pandemic lockdown.For industryand firm-level stocks with positive cumulative abnormal returns(CARs)in the event window when Wuhan was locked down,the reversals are stronger.Thus,the reversal effects are mostly driven by industries and stocks that positively overreact to COVID-19 than do others.Further investigation shows that overreactions are stronger for stocks with lower institutional ownership,which means that retail investors react more strongly to COVID-19.Among stocks with positive CARs in the event window,those with higher idiosyncratic volatilities and lower book-to-market ratios tend to have worse performance after one month.

A discussion of Hong-Stein model

In this paper,we discuss a kind of behavioral asset pricing model,called Hong-Stein model.Although this model succeeded in explaining the momentum and reversal effects,we find it usually reaches two extremes:the absolute value of autocorrelation of return sequence is so large that the direction of returns could be easily forecasted,or the value is so small that the elements in return sequence are almost independent of each other.The empirical results show that these two extremes are not supported by the real market data.