(Bloomberg) – Back in May, a Reddit poster hit WallStreetBets with a tip about Scorpio Tankers Inc. lever up and oil vault back after briefly turning negative.
There is an opportunity to see a return of 100% within the next year, ‘the user said.
Eight months later, the reward is: a 17% loss.
Another WallStreetBets poster was similarly breathless about their brilliant idea as Tesla Inc. was. in 2018. The result: a loss of 1,330%, not including loan fees, if accepted.
It is difficult to choose stocks. Almost no one has an advantage, and it is no sign of shame if a call does not break out.
But in all the hagiography awarded to Reddit retailers that GameStop Corps used before it skyrocketed, it’s worth remembering that a big enough prediction will always yield a few winners. Evidence of investment genius elsewhere is hard to find.
It is these warning stories about stock picking that are documented in research dealing with this era of WallStreetBets. A new article finds that traders on Robinhood Markets, on average, do not perform better over the next three to twenty days.
In fact, it tends to get a little worse.
“The apparent lack of skill of Robinhood investors is consistent with commission-free investors behaving like uninformed noise traders,” write Gregory W. Eaton and Brian S. Roseman of Oklahoma State University and T. Clifton Green and Yanbin Wu of the Emory University.
The authors also found that shares with mood on WallStreetBets a few days later have an increase in activity on Robinhood, a sign that there is likely to be a lot of overlap between the two communities.
To isolate investment skill, academics have adjusted 2020 returns for recent price movements and risk factors such as valuations and the size of a business. The bottom line: if you express the possibility that these traders are simply chasing the market trends, they are not actually choosing future winners.
The results do not mean that small investors in all brokers choose bad stocks. In fact, the four scholars found that the increase in the purchase of shares by a company generally predicts a higher future return. The problem for the Robinhood contingent is that they usually stack up on a stock almost a week after most of their peers.
“Although retailers appear to be investing in the same type of securities that are popular with Robinhood investors, we find that the broader benchmark for retail leads to trading in Robinhood by a few days, which may help explain the difference in performance,” the authors said. . wrote.
The research only covers the first eight months of last year because Robinhood stopped disclosing in August the number of users owning each share.
To be honest Robinhood, it seems the pattern is probably not limited to their platform. Another newspaper showed that smartphones are generally more likely to buy risky assets and chase returns from the past – in part because apps let them trade in the evening without thinking too much.
Spogregte
As the GameStop rally returns to earth, the new research could offer a gut check to amateurs whose bragging rights have reached fever this past week.
Yet many of them will dispute the conclusions, given how much in this new generation of investment they seem to have amassed wealth while spending hedge funds – largely empowered by trading platforms without commission.
When Covid hit markets for about six months to July 2020, a portfolio of the most popular stocks in the Robinhood app yielded an annual return of 105%, according to Wolfe Research.
GameStop Corp., the sticker child of retail speculation, is still more than 238% higher, even after the recent dive. Throw Sundial Growers Inc. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. in, and the Robinhood crowd seems to have several stories of incredible success.
The phenomenon remains relatively young, and therefore firm conclusions about the skills of the person picking involved or otherwise of those involved may be premature. And for the speculators who have plucked profits on these platforms, it may not matter much whether it comes down to picking winners or following the momentum of the market.
The success of retailers in general has been documented by different academics across different time frames and methods. In an article last year, Ivo Welch, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, showed a portfolio of general Robinhood possessions that achieved market benchmarks and a quantifier factor in the two years to mid-2020. .
Welch’s work has focused on shares that are widely owned by users, rather than those that see an increase in purchases on the platform. In the recent newspaper, much attention has been paid to the question of whether more purchases from the Robinhood crowd have actually led to excellent achievements – or not.
“Our evidence suggests that investors act without commission together as noise traders, and that changes in Robinhood ownership are not related to future returns,” the academics wrote.
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