IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ysm/somwrk/ysm28.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Rain or Shine: Where is the Weather Effect?

Author

Listed:
  • William N. Goetzmann

    (Yale School of Management, International Center for Finance)

  • Ning Zhu

    (University of California, Davis - Graduate School of Management)

Abstract

Saunders (1993) and Hirshleifer and Shumway (2001) document the effect of weather on stock returns. The proposed explanation in both papers is that investor mood affects cognitive processes and trading decisions. In this paper, we use a database of individual investor accounts to examine the weather effects on traders. Our analysis of the trading activity in five major U.S. cities over a six-year period finds virtually no difference in individuals' propensity to buy or sell equities on cloudy days as opposed to sunny days. If the association between cloud cover and stock returns documented for New York and other world cities is indeed caused by investor mood swings, our findings suggest that researchers should focus on the attitudes of market-makers, news providers or other agents physically located in the city hosting the exchange. NYSE spreads widen on cloudy days. When we control for this, the significance of the weather effect is dramatically reduced. We interpret this as evidence that the behavior of market-makers, rather that individual investors, may be responsible for the relation between returns and weather.

Suggested Citation

  • William N. Goetzmann & Ning Zhu, 2004. "Rain or Shine: Where is the Weather Effect?," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm28, Yale School of Management.
    • Handle: RePEc:ysm:somwrk:ysm28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=322300
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. David Easley & Soeren Hvidkjaer & Maureen O'Hara, 2002. "Is Information Risk a Determinant of Asset Returns?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(5), pages 2185-2221, October.
    2. Stephen Brown & William Goetzmann & Takato Hiraki & Noriyoshi Shiraishi & Masahiro Watanabe, 2002. "Investor Sentiment in Japanese and U.S. Daily Mutual Fund Flows," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm274, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Apr 2008.
    3. Chordia, Tarun & Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar & Anshuman, V. Ravi, 2001. "Trading activity and expected stock returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 3-32, January.
    4. David Hirshleifer & Tyler Shumway, 2003. "Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(3), pages 1009-1032, June.
    5. Goetzmann, William N. & Massa, Massimo, 2002. "Daily Momentum and Contrarian Behavior of Index Fund Investors," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 37(3), pages 375-389, September.
    6. Saunders, Edward M, Jr, 1993. "Stock Prices and Wall Street Weather," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 83(5), pages 1337-1345, December.
    7. Shapira, Zur & Venezia, Itzhak, 2001. "Patterns of behavior of professionally managed and independent investors," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 25(8), pages 1573-1587, August.
    8. Chordia, Tarun & Roll, Richard & Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar, 2002. "Order imbalance, liquidity, and market returns," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 65(1), pages 111-130, July.
    9. Mark Grinblatt & Matti Keloharju, 2000. "Distance, Language, and Culture Bias: The Role of Investor Sophistication," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm142, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Nov 2001.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Levy, Ori & Galili, Itai, 2008. "Stock purchase and the weather: Individual differences," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 67(3-4), pages 755-767, September.
    2. Siganos, Antonios & Vagenas-Nanos, Evangelos & Verwijmeren, Patrick, 2014. "Facebook's daily sentiment and international stock markets," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 107(PB), pages 730-743.
    3. Yiuman Tse & Brian C. McTier & John K. Wald, 2011. "Do Stock Markets Catch the Flu? We examine the impact of influenza on the U.S. stock market. A higher incidence of flu is associated with decreased trading, decreased volatility, and higher bid-ask sp," Working Papers 0004, College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio.
    4. Kaustia, Markku & Rantapuska, Elias, 2016. "Does mood affect trading behavior?," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 1-26.
    5. Siganos, Antonios & Vagenas-Nanos, Evangelos & Verwijmeren, Patrick, 2017. "Divergence of sentiment and stock market trading," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 130-141.
    6. Roy, Suvra & Nguyen, Harvey & Visaltanachoti, Nuttawat, 2023. "Be nice to the air: Severe haze pollution and mutual fund risk," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 58(C).
    7. Massimo Massa & William Goetzmann, 2003. "Disposition Matters: Volume, Volatility and Price Impact of a Behavioral Bias," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm333, Yale School of Management, revised 01 Apr 2005.
    8. Chang, Shao-Chi & Chen, Sheng-Syan & Chou, Robin K. & Lin, Yueh-Hsiang, 2008. "Weather and intraday patterns in stock returns and trading activity," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 32(9), pages 1754-1766, September.
    9. Shu, Pei-Gi & Yeh, Yin-Hua & Chiu, Shean-Bii & Chen, Hsuan-Chi, 2005. "Are Taiwanese individual investors reluctant to realize their losses?," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 201-223, March.
    10. Vasios, Michalis & Payne, Richard & Nolte, Ingmar, 2015. "Profiting from Mimicking Strategies in Non-Anonymous Markets," MPRA Paper 61710, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Itzhak Venezia, 2018. "Lecture Notes in Behavioral Finance," World Scientific Books, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., number 10751, August.
    12. Yiuman Tse & Brian C. McTier & John K. Wald, 2011. "Do Stock Markets Catch the Flu? We examine the impact of influenza on the U.S. stock market. A higher incidence of flu is associated with decreased trading, decreased volatility, and higher bid-ask sp," Working Papers 0004, College of Business, University of Texas at San Antonio.
    13. Sun, Yuxin & Ibikunle, Gbenga, 2017. "Informed trading and the price impact of block trades: A high frequency trading analysis," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 114-129.
    14. Pastor, Lubos & Stambaugh, Robert F., 2003. "Liquidity Risk and Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 111(3), pages 642-685, June.
    15. Nicholas Apergis & Alexandros Gabrielsen & Lee Smales, 2016. "(Unusual) weather and stock returns—I am not in the mood for mood: further evidence from international markets," Financial Markets and Portfolio Management, Springer;Swiss Society for Financial Market Research, vol. 30(1), pages 63-94, February.
    16. Corò, Filippo & Dufour, Alfonso & Varotto, Simone, 2013. "Credit and liquidity components of corporate CDS spreads," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 37(12), pages 5511-5525.
    17. Stefano DellaVigna, 2009. "Psychology and Economics: Evidence from the Field," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(2), pages 315-372, June.
    18. Samahita, Margaret & Holm, Håkan J., 2020. "Mining for Mood Effect in the Field," Working Papers 2020:2, Lund University, Department of Economics.
    19. Razvan STEFANESCU & Ramona DUMITRIU, 2011. "The SAD Cycle for the Bucharest Stock Exchange," Risk in Contemporary Economy, "Dunarea de Jos" University of Galati, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, pages 372-377.
    20. Min‐Hua Kuo & Shaw K. Chen, 2012. "Prospect theory and disposition patterns: evidence from Taiwan investors," Studies in Economics and Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 29(1), pages 43-51, March.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing; Trading Volume; Bond Interest Rates
    • G14 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Information and Market Efficiency; Event Studies; Insider Trading

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:ysm:somwrk:ysm28. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/smyalus.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.