In Search of Concepts: The Effects of Speculative Demand on Returns and Volume

July 13, 2013 Leave a comment

In Search of Concepts: The Effects of Speculative Demand on Returns and Volume

Owain Ap Gwilym Bangor Business School

Qingwei Wang Bangor Business School; Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW)

Iftekhar Hasan Fordham University; Bank of Finland

Ru Xie Bangor Business School

May 28, 2013
Bank of Finland Research Discussion Paper No. 10/2013

Abstract: 
Using a novel proxy of investors’ speculative demand constructed from online search interest in “concept stocks”, we examine how speculative demand affects the returns and trading volume of Chinese stock indices. We find that returns and trading volume increase with the contemporaneous speculative demand. In addition, the high speculative demand causes lower near future returns, while recent high past returns cause the high speculative demand. Moreover, the speculative demand explains more variation in returns and trading volume of A shares (more populated by retail investors) than B shares (less populated by retail investors). Our findings support the attention theory of Barber and Odean (2008).

Filed under Research

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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