A nice reward for Patrick Roger, Professor of Finance at EM Strasbourg Business School and co-director of the Behavioral Finance Chair. He has just received the Eurofidai Best Paper Award for an article co-written with Catherine d'Hondt, from UCLouvain. The award-winning article, “Investor sentiment and stock return predictability: The power of ignorance”, is part of a broader research program on the behavior of small shareholders on stock markets.
“The behavior of small investors is not irrational, every investor makes decisions according to their own logic and level of knowledge”, says Patrick Roger, “but it is true that they do not always meet the standards of traditional finance and that is what makes them interesting”. This research work, undertaken by Patrick Roger, Professor of Finance at EM Strasbourg abd Catherine d’Hondt, professor at UCLouvain in Belgium aims to gain insight into and analyze what the behaviour of this category of investors means.
To do this, no less than 40,000 portfolios of Belgian small shareholders were studied anonymously. This shows that, although these portfolios are generally poorly diversified and composed of a small number of securities, the aggregate information they reveal is very useful for management. From an academic point of view, it is therefore the aggregation of individual behaviors that reflects what we call investor sentiment. This sentiment is likely to be of interest to market participants and especially asset managers to help them improve the construction of their portfolios and manage risk better. These lessons are therefore partly set out in the article “Investor sentiment and stock return predictability: The power of ignorance”, co-authored with Catherine d'Hondt, which was therefore awarded the Eurofidai Best Paper Award. An award that crowns 8 years of original and specific work on this subject and that reinforces the credibility of EM Strasbourg Business School and its Behavioural Finance Chair.