Disposition Effect

More than twenty years ago, Meir Statman and I coined the term disposition effect to describe the predisposition of investors to sell their winners too early and to ride their losers too long. We identified a series of psychological phenomena that we believed explained the disposition effect, presented data consistent with the effect, and proposed some testable hypotheses. Since that time, a literature on the disposition effect has developed to test those hypotheses and extend the focus of discussion from investor behavior to pricing. In this article, I survey highlights of the disposition effect literature that are of special interest to investment professionals. Recent research concludes that the disposition effect impacts investment professionals, both directly and indirectly. The direct effect involves investment professionals tending to sell their winners too quickly and/or riding their losers too long. The indirect effect involves momentum in pricing that in part stems from so...

We provide evidence of disposition effect propensity for stock trading simulation participants employing a contrarian versus a momentum strategy. We found that even subjects playing with chips rather than real money remain vulnerable to those effects. Both tendencies were generally evident in our sample, but we also found individual differences. Subjects seemed to be contrarians both on position opening and on position closing. The main hypothesis of this paper states that contrarian investors are more prone to the disposition effect than are momentum traders. The model proposed by Dacey and Zielonka [2008] plays a crucial role in formulating this hypothesis. We consider the disposition effect not only in terms of the value function but also of the probability weighting function. In accordance with our hypothesis, we found that contrarian traders are more prone to the disposition effect.

Previous literature suggests specific behavioral tendencies cause investors to deviate from optimal investing. We investigate three such tendencies in a simplified stock market. Subjects do trade for better stocks, but do not reach their maximum potential earnings, most commonly because they choose to ignore information and continue to hold on to a stock regardless of its performance. The results support

The disposition effect (greater realization of winners than losers) is often taken as proof that investors have an inherent preference for realizing winners over losers. In contrast, we find that the disposition effect is not primarily driven by realization preference. The probability of selling as a function of profit is V-shaped, so that at short holding periods investors are much more likely to sell big losers than small ones. There is little indication of a jump discontinuity in selling probability at zero profits, as implied by an investor concern for the sign of ...

ABSTRACT:It has been a challenge for financial economists to explain some stylized facts observed in securities markets, among them, high levels of trading volume. The most prominent explanation of excess volume is overconfidence. High market returns make investors overconfident and as a consequence, these investors trade more subsequently and make some transactions more aggressively. The aim of our paper is to study the impact of the phenomenon of overconfidence on the trading volume and its role in the formation of the excess volume on the Tunisian stock market. Based on the work of Statman, Thorley and Vorkink (2006) and by using VAR models and impulse response functions, we find a little evidence of the overconfidence hypothesis when we use volume (shares traded) as proxy of trading volume.

The goal of this study is to test the disposition effect, the tendency of investors to sell winning investments too soon and hold losing investments too long, by analyzing all Brazilian equity fund portfolios from November 2003 to March 2008. The analysis based on the number of trades shows that equity funds are subject to the disposition effect. On the other hand, contrary to evidence from the American stock market, when the analysis is based on trading volume, the disposition effect is not found. Finally, the disposition effect is strongest in funds open to non-qualified investors.

Investment decisions are very difficult because they involve money and can impact our quality of life. According to the axioms of rationality, different but equivalent informa-tion formats should not affect investment strategies. The authors perform two experi-ments here, and find evidence of a strong absolute magnitude effect on investment de-cisions. In Experiment 1, participants (students) chose to sell a losing fund more often when returns were expressed as a percentage of variation between the buying value and the actual value (e.g., 24%) than when they were expressed as a monetary differ-ence between the buying price and the actual price (e.g., $0.24). In the context of the experiment, the percentage format decreased the disposition effect significantly. Fur-thermore, describing the stock returns as ratios (e.g., ¼) increased the tendency to-ward the status quo bias. In Experiment 2, the authors showed that the absolute mag-nitude of the numbers shaped participants' satisf...

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the disposition effect on the Portuguese stock market, on the basis of a unique database that consists of trading records of 1496 individual investors. We found strong evidence of the disposition effect, studied on the basis of trades, volume and value traded. This preference for realizing gains to losses was observed every month of the year and for all individual investors. Even in the end of the fiscal year, the disposition effect still holds (in spite of the existence of fiscal incentives for the so-called fiscal effect), as opposed to the evidence found in other markets. We also studied the disposition effect related to market tendency. By partitioning the data period in a bull and a bear period, we found evidence of disposition effect for both periods, but with differences in terms of its intensity. In bull market periods, the disposition effect is even more evident than in bear markets. These results, we believe, can strongly be explained with behavioral reasons. We also investigated the disposition effect related to investors' sophistication. We partitioned investors, classifying sophisticated investors as the ones that trade more frequently, have a higher volume of transactions and a higher portfolio value and found evidence that more sophisticated investors are less prone to the disposition effect than less sophisticated ones, even though both groups exhibit evidence of this effect.