Signed small trade turnover (SSTT) measures temporary uninformed buy or sell pressure that is initiated by small trades in the same direction. Using Nasdaq OMX Helsinki tick-by-tick trade data with known investor category, we confirm that SSTT is a robust proxy for uninformed trading. In the short term (1–3 months), stocks with a high proportion of signed small trades outperform, but in the medium (4–6 months) and long term (7–36 months), SSTT by individual investors has a negative correlation to stock returns, while SSTT by institutional investors and foreign nominees is not related to stock returns. Systematic trading behavior appears to better explain the excess return generated by the low SSTT portfolio relative to the high SSTT portfolio when compared to traditional risk factors in the CAPM and Fama-French models. In the aggregate, small trades are noise in the spirit of Kyle (1985) and Black (1986), but small trade behavior impacts the performance of individuals and not the performance of institutions. Large trades by both individuals and institutions perform better in the intermediate and long term, which lends some credibility to the practice of classifying larger trades as informed, but our results show that these trades are not always by institutions.

When brokers, analysts, and fund managers buy or sell stocks for their own accounts, these “access employees” of financial institutions outperform retail investors over short windows up to a month. They earn particularly high abnormal returns when they trade before earnings announcements, revisions of analyst recommendations, and large stock price changes. We also find evidence consistent with profitable front-running and information leakage around the execution of corporate insider trades and block trades by mutual funds, as well as the release of revised recommendations by analysts who work at the same brokerage firm.

This paper investigates whether the personal trading decisions of CEOs are related to their corporate acquisition decisions. We find that the personal trading performance of CEOs across all stocks they trade is significantly and positively related to the short-term performance of their mergers, and that CEOs exhibiting greater turnover on their personal common equity portfolios undertake acquisitions more frequently. Hence, a CEO's risk aversion, confidence and capability are consistent across their personal and corporate investment decisions.

We examine how ETF adoption affects retail investor performance using a comprehensive panel of 524,181 Finnish investors tracked from 2007 to 2022. ETF adopters tend to be older, predominantly male, and more active, holding smaller but better-diversified portfolios. Importantly, first-time use of ETFs yields statistically significant improvements in risk-adjusted returns. ETF users also demonstrate greater portfolio resilience during financial crises. Our findings confirm that ETFs serve as effective tools for enhancing performance and managing risk for retail investors.

This study uncovers how household investors intensify the effect of the 52-week high (52WH): increased volume and momentum-like returns at the 52WH price. Using daily household and institutional trading data, we find that households sharply increase their selling, particularly with limit orders at the 52WH price. This behavior is indicative of anchoring, as it is robust to past returns and intensified by proximity, market uncertainty, and salience of the 52WH. This uninformed limit order selling at and prior to the 52WH leads to a doubling of unconditional 52WH anomaly returns. Post-event returns benefit institutions, which act as counterparties.

Analysis of shareholdings reveals that corporate directors generate positive alpha when they hold board interlocked stocks, where they are not an insider but a current co-board member is. In contrast, directors do not outperform when they hold inside stocks or other stocks unconnected to the board network. Analysis of trades shows that directors outperform when they buy or sell their own company's stock as insiders. They also outperform when they buy interlocked stocks. Results are similar for trades made before firm-specific information events. We also find limited support for the hypothesis that industry familiarity improves performance.

How are trading activity and performance impacted by material events during individual investors’ lifetimes? Using a unique dataset, we identify transfers of common stock initiated by the major event of divorce and analyze trading patterns and performance of divorced traders. In aggregate, divorcing individuals underperform, and part of this underperformance is due to liquidation needs arising from divorce. Cross-sectionally, however, actively-trading divorced investors demonstrate superior performance in the window surrounding divorce settlement, while underperforming just prior to divorce. This result survives a difference-in-differences analysis based on a propensity-score matched sample of non-divorced investors. Our analysis thus suggests that the life-cycle distraction of divorce temporarily reduces the performance of active retail traders, which improves once the stressor is removed.

We use Finnish OMX Helsinki data to examine the relationship between demographic variables, individual investors' broker choices and trade informativeness. We find that men prefer to use Full-Service-Retail over Discount-Retail brokers and that a higher level of income leads to a higher likelihood of using Discount-Retail brokers. Women present more heterogenous broker choice behaviors. However, both genders are more likely to carry out larger trades through Discount-Retail brokers. We show that trades executed via Discount-Retail brokers are more informative than those of Full-Service-Retail brokers and that only Discount-Retail brokers show trade informativeness differences across gender after controlling for age. Collectively, women make more informative trades then men, but this result reverses after partitioning by age. We conclude that conditioning on the type of broker reduces unobserved individual investor heterogeneity and that demographic variables are essential to the understanding of broker clientele effect. Furthermore, clientele differences observed across broker types are market specific and dominate the effects of financial advice in determining trade informativeness.