Do individual short-sellers make money? Evidence from Korea

Shu-Feng Wang, Kuan-Hui Lee and Min-Cheol Woo

Journal of Banking & Finance, 2017, vol. 79, issue C, 159-172

Abstract: We use a proprietary trade- and account-level dataset of short sales to investigate the profitability of individual investors short-selling in the Korean stock market from August 1, 2007, to May 31, 2010. Using actual data on short-covering transactions, we find that the average profit is 26,810 Korean won (roughly USD 24.4) per trade per hour, and about 44% of shorted trades are covered within a day. We also find that the profitability of short-selling decreases as the hours-to-cover increases. Account-level analyses show that investors who sell short more firms make higher profits than those who sell short fewer firms and that the profitability of short-selling is persistent. We attribute the profitability to short-sellers’ ability to exploit short-run price reversals and information processing skills.

Keywords: Short-selling; Short cover; Individual investor; Emerging market; Korean stock market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426617300705
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbfina:v:79:y:2017:i:c:p:159-172

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbankfin.2017.03.012

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Banking & Finance is currently edited by Ike Mathur

More articles in Journal of Banking & Finance from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().