earticle

영어

We provide evidence supporting the presence of investors who prefer lottery-like stocks in the Korean stock market. Our empirical findings are as follows. First, we document that higher MAX stocks earn lower average returns, with MAX defined as the maximum daily return over the past month, as in Bali, Cakici, and Whitelaw (2011. Maxing out: Stocks as lotteries and the cross-section of expected returns. Journal of Financial Economics 99, 427-446). Specifically, we find that average risk-adjusted return differences between stocks in the lowest and highest MAX quintiles is 1.39 percent per month over our sample period. This finding suggests that investors have a preference for lottery-like assets, i.e., assets that have a relatively small chance of a large payoff. Given this preference, investors may be willing to pay more for stocks with lottery-like payoffs, prompting such stocks to have lower returns in the future. In this study, we measure the propensity for a stock to deliver lottery-like payoffs on the basis of MAX, defined as extreme positive returns over the past month, and find a negative relationship between MAX and expected returns in the cross-section. In other words, we demonstrate that lottery-like stocks, which presumably exhibit high MAX, have low expected returns in the Korean stock market, confirming previous findings for the U.S. market. Our finding of a negative relationship between MAX and expected returns appears to be robust to various cross-sectional effects such as size; book-to-market; and momentum, liquidity, and short-term return reversals. Both portfolio sorts and cross-sectional regressions reveal that the MAX-return relationship continues to be significant after controlling for other effects. Further, we find little evidence that the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle, i.e., the negative relationship between the idiosyncratic volatility and average returns in the cross-section documented by Ang, Hodrick, Xing, and Zhang (2006. The cross-section of volatility and expected returns. Journal of Finance 61, 259-299), account for the relationship between MAX and returns. Considering that MAX is, on average, positively related to idiosyncratic volatility, one can argue that the negative MAX-return relationship is a different appearance of the idiosyncratic volatility puzzle. However, our empirical results reveal that the MAX effect is robust to controls for the effect of idiosyncratic volatilities. Second, we find that stocks with high MAX tend to be small and low-priced, and have higher idiosyncratic volatility. Moreover, we observe that high MAX stocks are, on average, heavily traded by retail investors. MAX exhibits a monotonically increasing pattern in retail trading proportions (RTP) in the cross-section, where we define a stock’s RTP as the monthly buyer- and seller-initiated retail trading volume divided by the total trading volume of the stock in that month. This finding is consistent with the literature, which regards small, low-priced stocks exhibiting high idiosyncratic volatilities and skewness to have lottery-like features. Last, and most importantly, we find that the negative relationship between MAX and average returns is more prominent among stocks with higher retail trading proportions, using a unique dataset that enables us to identify retail investors’ trades. In particular, we find that the MAX-return relationship is more significant and negative among stocks with higher RTP. The strategy of selling high MAX stocks and buying low MAX stocks earns, on average, 1.87 (0.17) percent per month among stocks in the highest (lowest) RTP quintiles. This evidence is consistent with previous studies arguing that retail investors are more likely to have a greater gambling propensity. Collectively, we contribute to the literature on investors’ preferences by presenting evidence of investors’ preference for lottery-like stocks in the Korean stock market. We also contribute to the literature on retail investors’ trading behavior. We use a unique dataset from the Korean stock market that enables the identification of retail investors’ trades while providing empirical evidence that retail investors are more associated with the preference for lottery-like assets.

한국어

본 연구는 최고수익률(MAX)과 주식가격의 유의한 음의 관계가 국내 주식시장에도 존재함을 보인다. 구체적으로, 직전 1개월 동안의 일 최고수익률을 MAX로 정의하고 이 MAX로 매월 말 5개의 동일가중 포트폴리오를 구성하여 MAX가 가장 높은 포트 폴리오를 팔고 MAX가 가장 낮은 포트폴리오를 매수하는 전략을 구사하면 무위험 이자율 대비 월평균 1.27%의 유의한 초과수익률을 얻을 수 있음을 발견한다. 그리고 이러한 현상이 기업규모, 장부가치대시장가치비율, 모멘텀, 단기수익률반전, 유동성 등 수익률과 관련이 있다고 알려진 여러 기업특성들을 통제하고도 유의함을 확인한다. 이와 같은 결과는 전통적 자산가격결정 이론 하에서는 설명할 수 없는 것으로, 투자자 들이 복권과 같은 특성을 가지는(lottery-like) 주식을 선호하는 경향이 있다는 기존 연구의 주장과 일관된다. 또한 정확한 투자자 구분이 가능한 자료를 활용하여, 우리는 MAX가 높은 주식일수록 개인투자자의 거래비율이 높고 개인투자자 거래비율이 높은 주식 중에서 MAX의 효과가 더 유의함을 보고한다. 이는 개인투자자는 주로 복권 성향의 주식을 거래하고, 이러한 개인투자자의 선호가 이들 주식의 가격에 영향을 미친다는 주장을 지지하는 결과이다.