Do signal providers on social trading platforms exhibit behavioral biases? (PDF)

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,7, University of Marburg (Accounting & Finance), language: English, abstract: This work examines the effect of transparency on the trading behaviour in the context of social trading. The focus lies on the effect of transparency on the behavioural bias known as the disposition effect. The disposition effect indicates that trader tend to hold their losing stocks for a too long amount of time and sell their profitable stocks too soon. Additionally, the effect of transparency on the home bias will be analysed. The home bias is the trader's preference for domestic stocks at the expense of portfolio diversification.

The underlying question is: "Can transparency mitigate the extent of the disposition effect and home bias?" In the past, there has been a wide extent of competing theories about which factors influence these biases. However, a factor which has not been in the center of attention is transparency; in other words a permanent visible statistic about the trader's performance, trades, positions and their success. The results of this paper may help to draw comparisons to the field of traditional fund managers.

To begin with, this work will start by providing information about the status quo of the disposition effect and the home bias. This will show why it is important to look at transparency. Next, the idea behind social trading will be explained and the platform Wikifolio will be introduced. The empirical part will be divided into two segments. The first segment will cover the disposition effect. It will start with the underlying hypothesis, followed by the data sampling and empirical results. The segment about the empirical results will contain two panel data regressions that will analyse the trader's holding time of losing and gaining positions separately. The second segment will cover the hypothesis, data and empirical results of the home bias.