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Review of Finance Vol. 22 No. 6 2018

Uninformative Feedback and Risk Taking: Evidence from Retail Forex Trading

Itzhak Ben-David1; Justin Birru2; Viktor Prokopenya3

1 Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University and NBER · 2 Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University , · 3 Exp(Capital)

open access

Abstract

We document evidence consistent with retail traders in the Forex market attributing random success to their own skill and, as a consequence, increasing risk taking. Although past performance does not predict future success for these traders, traders increase trade sizes, trade size variability, and number of trades with gains, and less with losses. There is a large discontinuity in all of these trading variables around zero past week returns: e.g., traders increase their trade size dramatically following winning weeks, relative to losing weeks. The effects are stronger for novice traders, consistent with more intense “learning” in early trading periods.

DOI
10.1093/rof/rfy022
Volume
22
Issue
6
Pages
2009-2036
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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