IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ajf/louvlr/2021001.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Googlization and retail trading activity

Author

Listed:
  • Desagre, Christophe

    (Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/LFIN, Belgium)

  • D’Hondt, Catherine

    (Université catholique de Louvain, LIDAM/LFIN, Belgium)

Abstract

A large body of literature documents a positive relationship between the Google Search Volume Index (SVI) and market returns or volumes. Such findings are consistent with a buying pressure due to increased attention. Unlike most of the studies that use market data, we use the trading accounts for a sample of retail investors. The advantage is twofold; we are able to disentangle purchases from sales, and our results are not biased by any institutional trading. We find that the relationship between the SVI and retail trading activity is positive but not stronger for purchases than for sales. We also demonstrate evidence of a bidirectional causality between attention and trading activity, though contemporaneous effects predominate. Our results are robust to controls based on sociodemographics or subjective investor characteristics, as well as various specifications of the SVI and different measures of trading activity.

Suggested Citation

  • Desagre, Christophe & D’Hondt, Catherine, 2021. "Googlization and retail trading activity," LIDAM Reprints LFIN 2021001, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain Finance (LFIN).
    • Handle: RePEc:ajf:louvlr:2021001
    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbef.2020.100453
    Note: In: Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, 2021, vol. 29, 100453
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Catherine D’hondt & Maxime Merli & Tristan Roger, 2021. "What drives retail portfolio exposure to ESG factors?," Post-Print hal-03373287, HAL.
    2. Chen, Zhongdong & Craig, Karen Ann, 2023. "Active attention, retail investor base, and stock returns," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance, Elsevier, vol. 39(C).
    3. de Castro, Jessica & Piccoli, Pedro, 2023. "Do online searches actually measure future retail investor trades?," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    4. D’Hondt, Catherine & Merli, Maxime & Roger, Tristan, 2022. "What drives retail portfolio exposure to ESG factors?," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 46(PB).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Investor attention ; Google SVI ; Retail investors;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • G11 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions
    • G40 - Financial Economics - - Behavioral Finance - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ajf:louvlr:2021001. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Séverine De Visscher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lfuclbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.