Saturday, September 15, 2012

Let's get on the street - Part II

Furthering my experimentation with the real world data, I delved into the minds and psychology of investors. I had taken a course on Behavioral Finance that explains certain irrational phenomena that governs the nature of humans when then invest. This nature has certain shortcomings that are overcome by what has emerged to be known as systematic investing where a computer algorithm makes the decisions rather than a human who can be misguided by emotions.

The following Abstract gives a brief overview of the analysis:

There are many instances when a stock price experiences a sudden jump or a decline and, besides the financial crisis, it has to do with a fundamental change in the business of the stock. Eg. the consumer reaction to netflix's fee structure or a revelation of the revenue reporting mechanism of Groupon or the billions of dollars of trading losses by a bank or the passing of a law that gives huge tax incentives to renewable energy. These events cause almost an immediate reaction by the market reflected by the stock price changes and then as these events are studied in depth and their true impact is understood, the stocks migrate towards their true valuation. The relationship between a surge or a drop and the later migration is something that interacts with human nature and, if understood well, can be leveraged to generate investment idea. In this paper I shall explore such drastic movements and try to understand what their impact is on the stock prices. This is more complicated than it seems because of a change in investors' perceptions after the financial crisis and because of different nature of information dissemination for firms in different segments.

Investing on Behavioral bias

Disclaimer: Please read
Please note that this is my independent work where I have used data from yahoo finance to explore time series concepts from a course I took in statistics. It may inadvertently have an overlap with a work that somebody else has already done and I have no intentions of replicating it. I would be glad to know of any such clash and post a clarification on this post.
I am open to having my work being redistributed or used but only after due credit and a reference has been made. Feel free to contact me to avoid any misunderstandings or if you need more details from this paper.

*The analysis is still underway and the conclusions are under review

No comments :

Post a Comment