The Trading Behavior of Institutions and Individuals in Chinese Equity Markets
Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 31, pp. 2695-2710
Posted: 3 Nov 2006 Last revised: 22 May 2008
There are 2 versions of this paper
The Trading Behavior of Institutions and Individuals in Chinese Equity Markets
Abstract
This paper employs a unique data set to analyze the trading behavior of 4.74 million individual and institutional investors across Mainland China. Results show that groups of individual investors with varying trade values (as proxies for wealth levels) engage in different trading strategies. Chinese institutions are momentum investors, while less wealthy Chinese individual investors at large are contrarian investors. The results also indicate that a small group of wealthiest Chinese individuals tend to behave like institutions when they buy stocks, and behave like less wealthy individuals when they sell. Furthermore, only the trading activities of institutions and of wealthiest individuals can affect future stock volatility, but those of Chinese individual investors at large have no predictive power for future stock returns.
Keywords: Trading behavior, momentum and contrarian strategies, stock volatility
JEL Classification: G11, G15
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