The Correlated Trading and Investment Performance of Individual Investors

Abstract

<p>Individual investors tend to trade in the same direction as other individual investors in the same broker branch. The more pronounced an individual investor's herding behavior, the worse his/her investment performance. We find that the limit orders of herding investors have a lower execution ratio, a longer time-to-execution, and a higher probability of being picked up by institutional investors, indicating that their orders are subject to the pick-off risk as they face fierce execution competition and tend to become stale after submissions. Finally, we find that individual investors learn from experience and herd less in the future.</p>