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A higher frequency of positive overnight returns followed by negative trading day reversals during a month suggests a more intense daily tug of war between opposing investor clienteles, who are likely composed of noise traders overnight and arbitrageurs during the day. We show that a more intense daily tug of war predicts higher future returns in the cross section. Additional tests support the conclusion that, in a more intense tug of war, daytime arbitrageurs are more likely to discount the possibility that positive news arrives overnight and thus overcorrect the persistent upward overnight price pressure.

We examine the relation between the investment horizons of insiders and the information content of their trading activity regarding future stock returns. We conjecture that an insider’s investment horizon establishes a benchmark for expected patterns of continued trading behavior, and thus helps to identify unexpected insider trades, which should be more informative in efficient markets. Consistent with this conjecture, the trades of short horizon insiders are both more unexpected and more informed than those of long horizon insiders, on average. Short horizon insiders and their firms also tend to display attributes that are associated with a greater focus on short-termism.

We examine the association between margin requirements and the market’s efficiency in incorporating firm-specific and market-level public news. Combining the Fed’s 22 changes in margin requirements with a hand-collected sample of earnings announcements between 1934-1975, we show that higher margin requirements induce greater delay in incorporating earnings information into prices. We draw similar conclusions when we analyze the Hou and Moskowitz (2005) price delay measure, as well as indirect measures of leverage constraints over recent years. Further tests suggest that, despite the Fed’s expressed intent to curtail excess speculation, higher margin requirements restrict trading by arbitrageurs more than noise traders.

We investigate the role of extreme positive payoffs in the distribution of monthly fund returns in investors’ mutual fund preferences. We document a positive and significant relationship between the maximum style-adjusted monthly return (MAX) and future fund flows. The relationship is robust to controlling for average performance, volatility, skewness, and various other fund characteristics. Our findings are consistent with the notion that fund investors overweight the probability of high payoff states in the past return distribution. We further show that MAX is not a useful predictor of future performance and that an increase in a fund’s visibility does not explain our findings.

This study shows that the recent trajectory of a firm's profits predicts future profitability and stock returns. The predictive information contained in the trend of profitability is not subsumed by the level of profitability, earnings momentum, or other well-known determinants of stock returns. The profit trend also predicts the earnings surprise one quarter later, and analyst forecast errors over the following 12 months, suggesting that sophisticated investors underreact to the information in the profit trend. On the other hand, we find no evidence of investor overreaction, and our results cannot be explained by well-known risk factors. JEL Classifications: G12; G14.

A higher frequency of positive overnight returns followed by negative trading day reversals during a month suggests a more intense daily tug of war between opposing investor clienteles, who are likely composed of noise traders overnight and arbitrageurs during the day. We show that a more intense daily tug of war predicts higher future returns in the cross section. Additional tests support the conclusion that, in a more intense tug of war, daytime arbitrageurs are more likely to discount the possibility that positive news arrives overnight and thus overcorrect the persistent upward overnight price pressure.

Several months before information becomes public, the level of short interest contains value-relevant information about publicly traded corporations. Short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. This informational content is stronger for stocks that are harder to short. We also find that nearly half of the well-known cross-sectional relation between short interest and future stock returns is related to future changes in firms’ value-relevant information. Our results suggest that short interest predicts future returns, in part, due to short sellers’ ability to uncover unfavorable information about firms.

We provide evidence that sophisticated investors like short sellers, option traders, and financial institutions are more informed when trading stocks of companies with more connected board members. For firms with large director networks, the annualized return difference between the highest and lowest quintile of informed trading ranges from 4% to 7.2% compared to the same return difference in firms with less connected directors. Sophisticated investors better predict outcomes of upcoming earnings surprises and firm-specific news sentiment for companies with more connected directors. Changes in board connectedness are positively associated with changes in measures of adverse selection.

Efficiency in the capital markets requires that capital flows are sufficient to arbitrage anomalies away. We examine the relation between flows to a quantitative (quant) strategy that is based on capital market anomalies and the subsequent performance of this strategy. When these flows are high, quant funds are able to implement arbitrage strategies more effectively, which in turn leads to lower profitability of market anomalies in the future, and vice versa. Thus, the degree of cross-sectional equity market efficiency varies across time with the availability of arbitrage capital.

I provide evidence that stocks experiencing unusually low trading volume over the week prior to earnings announcements have more unfavorable earnings surprises. This effect is more pronounced among stocks with higher short-selling constraints. These findings support the view that unusually low trading volume signals negative information, since, under short-selling constraints, informed agents with bad news stay by the sidelines. Changes in visibility or risk-based explanations are insufficient to explain the results. This evidence provides insights into why unusually low trading volume predicts price declines.

When investors anticipate the Fed increasing margin requirements, they bid up the riskier stocks in the long legs of hedge portfolios associated with the market, HML, and SMB factors relative to the less risky stocks in the short legs. Following such a policy change, the returns on these hedge portfolios decline, implying lower subsequent compensation for bearing the risk associated with these three factors. In contrast, margin requirements are unrelated to returns on the momentum factor. Our evidence suggests that investors adjust their risk exposures to the market, SMB, and HML factors when leverage constraints are changed, but not momentum.

We investigate the dual notions that “dumb money” exacerbates well-known stock return anomalies and “smart money” attenuates these anomalies. We find that aggregate flows to mutual funds (dumb money) appear to exacerbate cross-sectional mispricing, particularly for growth, accrual, and momentum anomalies. In contrast, hedge fund flows (smart money) appear to attenuate aggregate mispricing. Our results suggest that aggregate flows to mutual funds can have real adverse allocation effects in the stock market and that aggregate flows to hedge funds contribute to the correction of cross-sectional mispricing.

Combining a large archive of public corporate news events with retail trading records from NYSE, we examine the profitability of individual investors’ trades around public news releases. We find that individual investors benefit significantly from the news releases when trading. The relation between net trading by individual investors and future returns is four times as large on positive news days as that on no news days. Moreover, the results are more pronounced for firms with higher information uncertainty and at times of high market uncertainty. Individual investors do not anticipate news and our results are not explained by liquidity provision, higher investor attention, or changes in liquidity around news days. Overall, the evidence suggests that an important channel through which individual traders predict future stock returns is their ability to successfully process the information revealed in the news events.

We examine whether boardroom connections help managers identify non-fundamental price shocks. We find that managers of well-connected firms are less likely to cut investment in response to exogenous non-fundamental drops in stock prices. Moreover, firms with stronger corporate governance and less managerial entrenchment are more successful at cultivating the informational benefits of boardroom connections. We further find that executive networks and director connections to board members at firms in the same industry are more effective at insulating firm investment from the adverse effects of exogenous non-fundamental shocks. Taken together, our findings suggest that improving managers’ assessment of firm fundamentals is an important channel through which director networks add value to the firm.

Unusually high aggregate stock trading volume in one week predicts higher excess market returns in the following week, especially when accompanied by high market volatility. This predictive relation is robust across alternative measures of aggregate trading volume. In out-of-sample forecasting tests, unusually high aggregate volume outperforms a host of other variables that have been shown to forecast the equity premium. Our evidence is most consistent with a risk premium associated with shocks to market-wide disagreement among market participants. Return autocorrelations, visibility effects, and market sentiment do not explain our findings.

We present new evidence that highlights the role of information intermediaries in the distribution and processing of earnings estimates in capital markets. We find that the time taken to activate an analyst's earnings forecast in the Thomson Reuters Institutional Brokers’ Estimate System is related to measures of investor demand for timely information processing, processing difficulty, and limited attention. Furthermore, we find that forecast announcement returns are muted and post-announcement drift is magnified for forecasts with longer unexpected activation delay and that market inefficiency is concentrated in neglected stocks and potentially exploitable. Finally, analyzing intraday returns, we find that activations facilitate price discovery.

This study shows that the recent trajectory of a firm’s profits predicts future profitability and stock returns. The predictive information contained in the trend of profitability is not subsumed by the level of profitability, earnings momentum, or other well-known determinants of stock returns. The profit trend also predicts the earnings surprise one quarter later, and analyst forecast errors over the following twelve months, suggesting that sophisticated investors underreact to the information in the profit trend. On the other hand, we find no evidence of investor overreaction, and our results cannot be explained by well-known risk factors

Firm-level monthly short interest is positively and significantly related to the returns of firms that compete in the same product markets. This finding is robust to standard controls and cannot be explained by industry momentum, industry lead-lag relationships, or industry information spillover effects. Short interest also contains information about the fundamentals of competing firms. Trading cost reductions are an important driver for trading a firm’s competitors rather than the firm’s own stocks. Our findings suggest that short sellers’ trades play an important role in the price discovery of competing firms, beyond their direct effects documented previously.

We investigate the dual notions that “dumb money” exacerbates well-known stock return anomalies, and “smart money” attenuates these anomalies. We find that aggregate flows to mutual funds (“dumb money”) appear to exacerbate cross-sectional mispricing, particularly for growth, accrual, and momentum anomalies. In contrast, hedge fund flows (“smart money”) appear to attenuate aggregate mispricing. Our results suggest that aggregate flows to mutual funds may have real adverse allocation effects in the stock market, while aggregate flows to hedge funds contribute to the correction of cross-sectional mispricing.

We provide evidence that sophisticated investors like short sellers, option traders, and financial institutions are more informed when trading stocks of companies with more connected board members. For firms with large director networks, the annualized return difference between the highest and lowest quintile of informed trading ranges from 4% to 7.2% compared to the same return difference in firms with less connected directors. Sophisticated investors better predict outcomes of upcoming earnings surprises and firm-specific news sentiment for companies with more connected directors. Changes in board connectedness are positively associated with changes in measures of adverse selection.

We show that short interest predicts future bad news, negative earnings surprises, and downward revisions in analyst earnings forecasts. Moreover, short interest is a better predictor of changes in firm fundamentals for stocks that are harder to short and short sellers appear to have information about these events several months before they become public. Most importantly, the well-known cross-sectional relation between short interest and future stock returns vanishes after controlling for short sellers’ information about future fundamental news. Thus, short sellers contribute in a significant manner to price discovery about firm fundamentals.

I provide evidence that stocks experiencing unusually low trading volume over a week prior to earnings announcements have more unfavorable earnings surprises. This effect is more pronounced among stocks with higher short-sale restrictions. Moreover, stocks experiencing extreme negative earnings surprise tend to have a higher decrease in abnormal trading volume prior to the announcement. The findings support the idea that under short-sale restrictions, unusually low trading volume is a signal of unfavorable value-relevant information. Change in visibility or risk-based explanations are insufficient to explain the results. The results provide insights into why unusually low trading volume predicts price declines.

Efficiency in the capital markets requires that capital flows are sufficient to arbitrage anomalies away. We examine the relationship between flows to a "quant" strategy that is based on capital market anomalies, and the subsequent performance of this strategy. When these flows are high, quant funds are able to implement arbitrage strategies more effectively, which, in turn, leads to lower profitability of market anomalies in the future, and vice versa. Thus, the degree of cross-sectional equity market efficiency varies across time with the availability of arbitrage capital.

The pricing of total liquidity risk is studied in the cross-section of stock returns. The study suggests that there is a positive relation between total volatility of liquidity and expected returns. Our measure of liquidity is based on Amihud (2002) and its volatility is measured using daily data. Furthermore, we document that total volatility of liquidity is priced in the presence of systematic liquidity risk: the covariance of stock returns with aggregate liquidity, the covariance of stock liquidity with aggregate liquidity, and the covariance of stock liquidity with the market return. The separate pricing of total volatility of liquidity indicates that idiosyncratic liquidity risk is important in the cross section of returns. This result is puzzling in light of Acharya and Pedersen (2005) who develop a model in which only systematic liquidity risk affects returns. The positive correlation between the volatility of liquidity and expected returns suggests that risk averse investors require a risk premium for holding stocks that have high variation in liquidity. Higher variation in liquidity implies that a stock may become illiquid with higher probability at a time when it is traded. This is important for investors who face an immediate liquidity need and are not able to wait for periods of high liquidity to sell.

We explore the premise that the degree of market efficiency changes dynamically as investment funds face time-varying funding constraints to arbitrage capital. We show that the returns to a composite long-short hedge strategy that encompasses relative value, momentum, short-run reversals, and accounting profitability, are higher when past returns to the strategy are low, and past volatility is high, which is when fund managers are particularly likely to be impeded in attracting funds. Furthermore, returns to the strategy also are higher when there are net outflows from funds that load heavily on the returns to the composite strategy. Our results support the notion that the efficiency of stock pricing is not a static concept but varies across time as agents face time varying constraints on arbitrage capital.

We study the liquidity exposures of value and growth stocks over business cycles. In worst times, value stocks have higher liquidity betas than in best times, while the opposite holds for growth stocks. Small value stocks have higher liquidity exposures than small growth stocks in worst times, while small growth stocks have higher liquidity exposures than small value stocks in best times. Combined with the fact that growth stocks have lower market risk than value stocks in bad times (as documented by Petkova and Zhang, 2005), our results are consistent with a flight-to-quality explanation for the countercyclical nature of the value premium. Investors seeking safer assets in bad times may want to liquidate value stocks more aggressively than growth stocks. This increase in selling pressure could make value stocks more sensitive to liquidity risk than growth stocks in recessions. We show that the relative order imbalances of value-minus-growth strategies decreases as economic conditions worsen. This suggests that in bad times investors sell value stocks more aggressively than growth stocks, and this activity results in relatively greater illiquidity in value stocks. Overall, exposure to time-varying liquidity risk, combined with the liquidity price of risk, is able to capture 35% of the small-stock value premium and 100% of the large-stock value premium.

We document an important relation between two well-established anomalies: momentum and short-term reversal. Only stocks with negative momentum experience short-term reversal. Using Chan's (2003) news database, we show that the market appears to overreact to public news following bad past performance and underreact following strong past performance. The results are robust to using alternative methodologies. Stocks with current good news and negative momentum earn on average -9.3% annual raw returns during the subsequent month, while stocks with current good news and positive momentum earn 32.2%. The large, negative raw returns point to cognitive biases, rather than risk-based explanations, as the source of abnormal returns.

High levels of short interest predict negative abnormal returns, but the reasons for this predictability are not well understood. Two popular explanations suggest very different interpretations. According to Miller (1977), stocks are overvalued in the presence of short-sale constraints, and the subsequent negative abnormal returns represent a correction of this overvaluation. Based on recent evidence in the accounting and microstructure literature, an alternative explanation is that short sellers are highly informed traders and short interest, therefore, predicts future returns due to its information content. We discriminate between the overvaluation and the information hypotheses and find support for the latter. Therefore, our evidence suggests that short sellers act as specialized monitors who generate value-relevant information in the stock market.