Abstract - Overconfidence and Trading Volume (joint work with M. Weber)

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, the better than average effect, illusion of control, unrealistic optimism). 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.

Speaker:
Markus Glaser
Affiliation:
University of Mannheim
Date:
03.May 2005


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