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Biotech / Medical : Biotech Valuation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Biomaven who wrote (9778)	12/17/2003 9:28:48 AM
From: Biomaven	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 52153

This article is likely even more applicable to biotechs, although I'm not sure there is in fact any substantial individual buying on bad news in biotech. All that Glitters: The Effect of Attention and News on the Buying Behavior of Individual and Institutional Investors BRAD M. BARBER University of California at Davis TERRANCE ODEAN University of California, Berkeley - Haas School of Business Abstract: We test the hypothesis that individual investors are more likely to be net buyers of attention-grabbing stocks than are institutional investors. We speculate that attention-based buying is a result of the difficulty that individual investors have searching the thousands of stocks they can potentially buy. Individual investors don't face the same search problem when selling, because they tend to sell only a small subset of all stocks - those they already own. We look at three indications of how likely stocks are to catch investors' attention: daily abnormal trading volume, daily returns, and daily news. We calculate net order imbalances for more than 66,000 individual investors with accounts at a large discount brokerage, 647,000 individual investors with accounts at a large retail brokerage, 14,000 individual investor accounts at a small discount brokerage, and 43 professional money managers. Individual investors tend to be net purchasers of stocks on high attention days - days that those stocks experience high abnormal trading volume, days following extreme price moves, and days on which stocks are in the news. Institutional investors are more likely to be net buyers on days with low abnormal trading volume than on those with high abnormal trading volume. Their reaction to extreme price moves depends on their investment style. We develop a theoretical model of how attention-based buying affects asset prices. Consistent with the predictions of our model, we find that stocks bought by individual investors on high-attention days tend to subsequently under perform stocks sold by those investors. Full paper at: papers.ssrn.com