We propose a tractable model of an informationally inefficient market featuring nonrevealing prices, general preferences and payoff distributions, but not noise traders. We show the equivalence between our model and a substantially simpler one in which investors face distortionary investment taxes depending on both their identity and the asset class. This equivalence allows us to account for such phenomena as underdiversification. We further employ the model to assess approaches to performance evaluation and find that it provides a theoretical basis for some intuitive practices, such as style analysis, that have been adopted by finance professionals.

Investor preferences for holding speculative assets are likely to be more pronounced ahead of firms’ earnings announcements, probably because of lower inventory costs and immediate payoffs or because of enhanced investor attention. We show that the demand for lottery-like stocks is stronger ahead of earnings announcements, leading to a price run-up for these stocks. In sharp contrast to the standard underperformance of lottery-like stocks, lottery-like stocks outperform non-lottery stocks by about 52 basis points in the 5-day window ahead of earnings announcements. However, this return spread is reversed by 80 basis points in the 5-day window after the announcements. Moreover, this inverted-V-shaped pattern on cumulative return spreads is more pronounced among firms with a greater retail order imbalance, among firms with low institutional ownership, and in regions with a stronger gambling propensity, and it is also robust after controlling for past 12-month returns and various proxies for investor attention.