Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

submittedVersion

Publication Date

10-2021

Abstract

We provide an easy method to identify marketable retail purchases and sales using recent, publicly available U.S. equity transactions data. Individual stocks with net buying by retail investors outperform stocks with negative imbalances by approximately 10 bps over the following week. Less than half of the predictive power of marketable retail order imbalance is attributable to order flow persistence, while the rest cannot be explained by contrarian trading (proxy for liquidity provision) or public news sentiment. There is suggestive, but only suggestive, evidence that retail marketable orders might contain firm-level information that is not yet incorporated into prices.

Keywords

Retail investor, price improvements, return predictability

Discipline

Finance and Financial Management | Portfolio and Security Analysis

Research Areas

Finance

Publication

Journal of Finance

Volume

76

Issue

5

First Page

2249

Last Page

2305

ISSN

0022-1082

Identifier

10.1111/jofi.13033

Publisher

Wiley

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.13033

Share

COinS