Overconfidence and Trading Volume

Markus Glaser () and Martin Weber
Additional contact information
Markus Glaser: University of Mannheim, Postal: Lehrstuhl für Bankbetriebslehre, L5, 2, 681 31 Mannheim, Germany

No 40, SIFR Research Report Series from Institute for Financial Research

Abstract: Theoretical models predict that overconfident investors will trade more than rational investors. We directly test this hypothesis by correlating individual overconfidence scores with several measures of trading volume of individual investors (number of trades, turnover). Approximately 3,000 online broker investors were asked to answer an internet questionnaire which was designed to measure various facets of overconfidence (miscalibration, volatility estimates, better than average effect). The measures of trading volume were calculated by the trades of 215 individual investors who answered the questionnaire. We find that investors who think that they are above average in terms of investment skills or past performance (but who did not have above average performance in the past) trade more. Measures of miscalibration are, contrary to theory, unrelated to measures of trading volume. This result is striking as theoretical models that incorporate overconfident investors mainly motivate this assumption by the calibration literature and model overconfidence as underestimation of the variance of signals. In connection with other recent findings, we conclude that the usual way of motivating and modeling overconfidence which is mainly based on the calibration literature has to be treated with caution. Moreover, our way of empirically evaluating behavioral finance models - the correlation of economic and psychological variables and the combination of psychometric measures of judgment biases (such as overconfidence scores) and field data - seems to be a promising way to better understand which psychological phenomena actually drive economic behavior.

Keywords: Overconfidence; Differences of opinion; Trading volume; Individual investors; Investor behavior; Correlation of economic and psychological variables; Combination of psychometric measures of judgment biases and field data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D80 G10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2005-12-15
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fin and nep-fmk
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, 2007, pages 48.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sifr.org/PDFs/sifr-wp40.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

Related works:
Journal Article: Overconfidence and trading volume (2007)
Working Paper: Overconfidence and Trading Volume (2003)
Working Paper: Overconfidence and trading volume (2003)
Working Paper: Overconfidence and Trading Volume (2003)
Journal Article: Overconfidence and trading volume (1990)
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:hhs:sifrwp:0040

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SIFR Research Report Series from Institute for Financial Research Institute for Financial Research Drottninggatan 89, SE-113 60 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anki Helmer ().