Unbiased Disagreement in financial markets, waves of pessimism and the risk return tradeoff

Can investors with irrational beliefs be neglected as long as they are rational on average ? Do their trades cancel out with no consequences on prices, as implicitly assumed by traditional models? We consider a model with irrational investors, who are rational on average. We obtain waves of pessimism and optimism that lead to countercyclical market prices of risk and procyclical risk-free rates. The variance of the state price density is greatly increased. The long run risk-return relation is mod- i…ed; in particular, the long run market price of risk might be higher than both the instantaneous and the rational ones.irrational investors, rational on average

Disagreement in a Multi-Asset Market

This paper provides a simple framework to study the effect of disagreement in a multi-asset market equilibrium by considering two agents who disagree about expected returns, variances, and correlation of returns of two risky assets. When agents' subjective beliefs are characterized by mean preserving spreads of a benchmark homogeneous belief, we show that the effect of the disagreement does not cancel out in general and the effect in a multi-asset market can be very different from a single asset market. In particular, the market risk premium can increase and the risk-free rate can decrease significantly even when the market is overoptimistic and overconfident. © International Review of Finance Ltd. 2012

Is News Sentiment More Than Just Noise?

Big Data analytics has recently fostered significant research on the influence of news sentiment in finance. This paper thus examines the effect of news sentiment on crude oil prices for different investor types according to the noise trader approach. The noise trader approach assumes the presence of informed and uninformed investors. Informed investors possess a perfect information horizon, whereas uninformed investors trade upon noise signals, such as sentiment. Methodologically, we decompose the crude oil price with a Kalman filter into a Kalman-smoothed, fundamental price component and a noise residual. We then regress news sentiment on both decomposed oil price components. Our findings suggest that news sentiment not only has a significant positive effect on the noise residual (as suggested by the noise trader approach), but also on the fundamental price. Thus, we find empirical evidence contradicting the noise trader model, which assumes that only uninformed investors trade on sentiment

Heterogeneous Expectations and Bond Markets

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of bond markets, in which two groups of agents hold heterogeneous expectations about future economic conditions. Our model shows that heterogeneous expectations can not only lead to speculative trading, but can also help resolve several challenges to standard representative-agent models of the yield curve. First, the relative wealth fluctuation between the two groups of agents caused by their speculative positions amplifies bond yield volatility, thus providing an explanation for the "excessive volatility puzzle" of bond yields. In addition, the fluctuation in the two groups' expectations and relative wealth also generates time-varying risk premia, which in turn can help explain the failure of the expectation hypothesis. These implications, essentially induced by trading between agents, highlight the importance of incorporating heterogeneous expectations into economic analysis of bond markets.

Index portfolio and welfare analysis under heterogeneous beliefs

© 2016 Elsevier B.V. With a growing popularity of index funds, we adopt a differences-in-opinion, general equilibrium framework to examine theoretically whether investors are better off with an index portfolio than active investing. In contrary to the conventional view, we find that, even for an active investor with the most accurate belief, switching to an index portfolio can significantly improve his expected ex-post welfare when the active investors have incorrect beliefs or face incomplete information. Moreover, the welfare improvement becomes more substantial when the active investors are more risk averse

Foreign Exchange Speculation: An Event Study

Does speculation facilitate price discovery or instability? If it is price discovery, it is beneficial and should be encouraged; if it is instability, welfare is enhanced by its reduction. This paper seeks to distinguish between these two characteristics by analysing those times when speculation in the foreign exchange market is most extreme. A series of event studies are conducted on the extremes of speculative sentiment and speculative activity. If speculation is noise, extreme sentiment and extreme positions should lead to overshooting and increase risk of subsequent reversals. The finding that speculative extremes do not provide information about subsequent returns implies that speculation is part of the process of price discovery and that efforts to reduce it would reduce the informational efficiency of financial markets

The social meaning of financial wealth: Relational accounting in the context of 401(k) retirement accounts

Behavioral economics has become a dominant set of theories in explaining economic behavior, yet such behavior remains under the limited purview of psychological, cognitive, or neural approaches. This article draws on and extends Viviana Zelizer’s social meaning of money framework in conjunction with new work in ‘relational accounting’ to suggest a sociological counterpoint, focusing in particular on the social and symbolic meaning attached to individual 401(k) retirement accounts. Following a market downturn, neoclassical and behavioral economics predict various types of behavioral responses, in particular loss aversion – where investors seek to increase risk-taking rather than locking in a sure loss (a loss is more painful to bear than an equivalent gain). A sociological theory that understands the shared meaning of retirement saving would predict something different, a behavior I call durable conservatism. In this article, I show how this concept better explains observed risk behavior in Americans’ 401(k) accounts following the 2002 and 2008 bear markets in stocks, and how that response differed from the behavior documented in non-retirement brokerage accounts

Is Noise Trading Cancelled Out by Aggregation?

Conventional wisdom suggests that investors' independent biases should cancel each other out and have little impact on equilibrium at the aggregate level. In contrast to this intuition, this paper analyzes models with biased investors and finds that biases often have a significant impact on the equilibrium even if they are independent across investors. First, independent biases affect the equilibrium asset price if investor demand for the asset is a nonlinear function of the bias. Second, even if the demand function is linear in the bias, it may still have a significant impact on the equilibrium because of the fluctuation of the wealth distribution. An initial run-up of the stock price makes optimistic investors richer, which then further pushes the stock price up and leads to lower future returns. This effect can lead to price overshooting, i.e., a negative expected future return. Similarly, an initial drop of the stock price leads to higher future returns. Simple calibrations show that a modest amount of biases can have a large impact on the equilibrium.aggregation, bias, noise trading, behavioral finance