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When are Contrarian Profits Due to Stock Market Overreaction?

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Author Info
Andrew W. Lo
A. Craig MacKinlay

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Abstract

The profitability of contrarian investment strategies need not be the result of stock market overreaction. Even if returns on individual securities are temporally independent, portfolio strategies that attempt to exploit return reversals may still earn positive expected profits. This is due to the effects of cross-autocovariances from which contrarian strategies inadvertently benefit. We provide an informal taxonomy of return-generating processes that yield positive [and negative] expected profits under a particular contrarian portfolio strategy, and use this taxonomy to reconcile the empirical findings of weak negative autocorrelation for returns on individual stocks with the strong positive autocorrelation of portfolio returns. We present empirical evidence against overreaction as the primary source of contrarian profits, and show the presence of important lead-lag relations across securities.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 2977.

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Date of creation: Feb 1991
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2977

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Summers, Lawrence H, 1986. " Does the Stock Market Rationally Reflect Fundamental Values?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(3), pages 591-601, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Fama, Eugene F, 1970. "Efficient Capital Markets: A Review of Theory and Empirical Work," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 25(2), pages 383-417, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Scholes, Myron & Williams, Joseph, 1977. "Estimating betas from nonsynchronous data," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(3), pages 309-327, December. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Roll, Richard, 1984. " A Simple Implicit Measure of the Effective Bid-Ask Spread in an Efficient Market," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 39(4), pages 1127-39, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Andrew W. Lo, A. Craig MacKinlay, 1988. "Stock Market Prices do not Follow Random Walks: Evidence from a Simple Specification Test," Review of Financial Studies, Oxford University Press for Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(1), pages 41-66. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  6. De Bondt, Werner F M & Thaler, Richard, 1985. " Does the Stock Market Overreact?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(3), pages 793-805, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  7. Atchison, Michael D & Butler, Kirt C & Simonds, Richard R, 1987. " Nonsynchronous Security Trading and Market Index Autocorrelation," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 42(1), pages 111-18, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  8. Phillips, P C B, 1987. "Time Series Regression with a Unit Root," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(2), pages 277-301, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Kim, M.J. & Nelson, C.R. & Startz, R., 1988. "Mean Reversion In Stock Prices? A Reappraisal Of Empirical Evidence," Working Papers 88-15, University of Washington, Department of Economics.
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  10. Fama, Eugene F & French, Kenneth R, 1988. "Permanent and Temporary Components of Stock Prices," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 96(2), pages 246-73, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  11. De Bondt, Werner F M & Thaler, Richard H, 1987. " Further Evidence on Investor Overreaction and Stock Market Seasonalit y," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 42(3), pages 557-81, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  12. J. Bradford De Long & Andrei Shleifer & Lawrence H. Summers & Robert J. Waldmann, 1989. "Positive Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation," NBER Working Papers 2880, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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