Abstract: Despite the dominance of retail investors in the Chinese stock market, there’s a conspicuous absence of price momentum in weekly and monthly returns. This study uncovers the presence of price momentum in daily returns and, through a systematic analysis of trading heterogeneity among investors, links daily momentum to the attention and trading activities of new investors—a phenomenon particularly significant in emerging stock markets. Furthermore, our findings indicate the existence of daily price momentum in various other emerging markets, contrasting with its relative scarcity in developed ones.
Discussant: Cameron Peng, London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract: The financial press is a conduit for popular narratives that reflect collective
memory about historical events. Some collective memories relate to major
stock market crashes, and investors may rely on associated narratives, or
“crash narratives,” to inform current beliefs and choices. Using recent
advances in computational linguistics, we develop a higher-order measure
of narrativity based on newspaper articles that appear following major
crashes. We provide evidence that crash narratives propagate broadly once
they appear in news articles, and significantly explain predictive variation
in market volatility. We exploit investor heterogeneity using survey data to
distinguish the effects of narrativity and fundamental conditions and find
consistent evidence. Finally, we develop a measure of pure narrativity to
examine when financial press is more likely to employ narratives.
Discussant: Aditya Chaudhry, Ohio State University
Abstract: Expectations of firms' cash flows far into the future are central to corporate finance and asset pricing. Using a large, novel dataset on professional forecasters' terminal growth rates (TGR) of firms that includes information about forecaster identities, allowing us to gather detailed personal backgrounds of forecasters, we establish key facts and identify drivers of their (very) long-run cash flow expectations. First, TGR expectations contain distinct economic information relative to other forecasting series, such as IBES long-term growth (LTG) forecasts which capture shorter, 3-5-year forecast horizons. Second, TGR expectations strongly and robustly predict realized long-run firm growth. Third, consistent with firm life cycle models, TGR expectations decline with firm age. Fourth, with the exception of very mature firms where a firm's country and industry primarily account for the variation in TGRs, there exists large, persistent heterogeneity in TGR expectations across forecasters. Finally, compared to other settings (e.g., Giglio et al. 2021), forecaster demographics and backgrounds explain a larger part of the persistent heterogeneity in TGR expectations.
Cynthia Balloch, London School of Economics and Political Science
Cameron Peng, London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract: Beliefs are central to models of macroeconomics and finance, and related debates
Ï Surveys are increasingly used to test and characterize investors’ subjective beliefs
Ï Most evidence on subjective beliefs focuses on return expectation
• Subjective return expectation may include both risk premia and mispricing (i.e. alpha)
Ï Most evidence on subjective beliefs focuses on retail investors
• We know relatively little about more sophisticated individual investors
• In general, very difficult to link beliefs to portfolio data
