Customer orientation reflects the organizational culture and climate that promote behaviors enabling the firm to create superior value for its customers. Using a textual measure of customer orientation (Custor) constructed from 10-K filings, we document a positive and economically significant relation between Custor and stock returns in the financial crisis of 2008–2009 and the COVID-19 pandemic. High-Custor firms outperform low-Custor firms by 1.5% per month during the financial crisis and by 4.7% per month during the COVID-19 crisis. This positive Custor-returns relation is robust to different treatments and persists after accounting for factors that contribute to corporate resilience, such as CSR activities. Our findings lend credence to the notion that customer orientation enhances a firm’s social capital, leading to improved operational performance during adverse periods, whilst our empirical evidence further supports that Custor and CSR represent distinct pathways for building trust. Consequently, firms that prioritize customer orientation experience greater resilience to negative shocks, especially during periods of low market confidence.

We provide strong evidence that the dispersion of individual stock options trading volume across moneynesses (IDISP) contains valuable information about future stock returns. Stocks with high IDISP consistently underperform those with low IDISP by more than 1% per month. In line with the idea that IDISP reflects dispersion in investors’ beliefs, we find that the negative IDISP-return relationship is particularly pronounced around earnings announcements, in high sentiment periods and among stocks that exhibit relatively high short-selling impediments. Moreover, the IDISP effect is highly persistent and robustly distinct from the effects of a large array of previously documented cross-sectional return predictors.