Dong Lou

Anticipated and Repeated Shocks in Liquid Markets

We show that Treasury security prices in the secondary market decrease significantly before subsequent auctions and recover shortly after. This price pattern implies a large issuance cost for the Treasury Department, which is estimated to be between 9 and 18 basis points of the auction size. For example, this cost amounts to over half a billion dollars for issuing Treasury notes alone in 2007. Our results appear to be consistent with the hypothesis of primary dealers’ limited risk-bearing capacity and the imperfect capital mobility of end investors in the Treasury market (e.g., federal agencies, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and etc.), highlighting the important role of capital mobility even in the most liquid financial markets.

IQ from IP: Simplifying Search in Portfolio Choice

Using a novel database that tracks web traffic on the SEC’s EDGAR server between 2004 and 2015, we show that institutional investors gather information on a very particular subset of firms and insiders, and their surveillance is very persistent over time. This tracking behavior has powerful implications for their portfolio choice, and its information content. An institution that downloaded an insider-trading filing by a given firm last quarter increases its likelihood of downloading an insider-trading filing on the same firm by more than 41.3% this quarter. Moreover, the average tracked stock that an institution buys generates annualized alphas of over 12% relative to the purchase of an average non-tracked stock. We find that institutional managers tend to track members of the top management teams of firms (CEOs, CFOs, Presidents, and Board Chairs), and tend to share educational and location-based commonalities with the specific insiders they choose to follow. Collectively, our results suggest that the information in tracked trades is important for fundamental firm value and is only revealed following the information-rich dual trading by insiders and linked institutions.

Leverage Network and Market Contagion

Using detailed data of margin investors’ leverage ratios and trading activities, we provide novel evidence for the effect of margin-induced trading on the cross-section of stock returns during the recent market turmoil in China. We first document the deleverge-induced sales. Aggregating this behavior across margin investors, we find a significant return spillover: a stock’s return can be strongly forecasted by a portfolio of stocks with which it shares common margin investor ownership. This pattern is subsequently reversed, and is present only in market downturns. Exploiting three government bailout waves of the stock market, we provide additional evidence for the shock transmission role of, and the systematic importance of central stocks in the leverage network.

'Consistent' Earnings Surprises

This paper tests the hypothesis that analysts report biased earnings estimates in order to enhance their stock recommendation performance. In particular, we argue that analysts with optimistic (pessimistic) stock recommendations tend to issue negatively (positively) biased earnings forecasts so that the underlying firms are more likely to beat (miss) the consensus forecasts and thus have higher (lower) stock returns after these recommendations are issued. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that average stock recommendations prior to earnings announcements significantly and positively predict subsequent earnings surprises. In addition, the predictability is substantially stronger when the net benefits associated with such strategic behavior are larger, for example, among firms with lower analyst coverage.