We extend previous studies on the effect of behavioral biases on investor hold/sell decisions, and examine whether behavioral biases affect the order submission strategies. We use a unique database provided by the Shanghai Stock Exchange, which contains order submissions and executions as well as trading records of all investors. We find investors are less aggressive in submitting sell orders for stocks that experienced losses, and more aggressive in submitting sell orders for stocks that experienced gains. The sell order aggressiveness is negatively related to the size of losses, but has a quadratic relationship with the size of gains. Results are consistent with the combination of the disposition and the house money effects.

This paper examines the changes in investors' trading behavior after winning an IPO allotment in China—a purely luck-driven event. We find that these investors subsequently become overconfident: They trade more frequently and lose more money relative to other investors. This effect is stronger when investors are inexperienced and when investors' pre-existing level of overconfidence is low. We also show that investors exhibit a stronger gambling propensity and hold more lottery-like stock after winning an IPO allotment. Our findings are not explained by wealth effects or house money effects. Overall, our evidence indicates that the experience of good luck makes people overconfident about their prospects.

Using a proprietary data set covering all foreign investors’ daily trades in the Chinese stock market from 2016 to 2019, we find that foreign order flows, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns, implying that these order flows are likely informed. We track the source of this informativeness and find that foreign order flows significantly predict firm-level news and news-day returns, suggesting that foreign investors can effectively process local firm information. Finally, we find that regulatory reforms that generally relax investment access requirements further improve foreign investors’ predictive power.

Using comprehensive account-level data, we separate Chinese retail investors into 5 groups and document strong heterogeneity in trading dynamics and performances. Retail investors with smaller account sizes cannot predict future returns correctly, display daily momentum patterns, fail to process public news, and show overconfidence and gambling preferences, while retail investors with larger account balances predict future returns correctly, display contrarian patterns, and incorporate public news in trading. Using performance measures established in previous literature, we find that smaller retail investors suffer from poor stock selection abilities and trading costs, while large retail investors’ stock selection abilities are offset by trading costs.

We investigate the determinants and effects of firm-initiated trading suspension during the Chinese stock market crash in July 2015. Our findings reveal that firms implemented suspensions to prevent investors’ panic selling, mitigate negative economic feedback, and safeguard specific shareholders’ interests. Once trading resumes, suspended stocks quickly align with the returns of comparable stocks, indicating that investors do not appear to penalize these firms in terms of valuation. Regarding post-resumption trading profits, small individual investors and institutions experience losses, whereas large individual investors and state agencies realize gains.