Capital gains overhang and irrelevant value characteristics of Brazilian companies

Resumen

This study, based on Ahmed’s (2017) work for the US market, examines whether the prices of shares traded on the stock market of a developing country, such as Brazil, can also be influenced by noise traders who make their decisions based on irrelevant information. Using data from the Brazilian stock market between Jan/2003 and Sep/2018 we show that irrelevant firm characteristics are associated with variations in capital gains overhang (CGO), a proxy for the disposition effect bias. Our results are quite similar to those found by Ahmed (2017) for the US. However, the two markets show different results for the relationship between CGO and market liquidity and systematic risk for the entire sample period. Also, we find that there is an inverse relationship between investor sentiment and CGO at times of market upward movement. Overall, the influence of variables considered irrelevant was confirmed in robustness checks. These results may imply that noise traders evaluate stocks and companies based on their irrelevant characteristics, and this behavior, which is not compensated for by rational investors, temporarily influences the market by generating price distortions like the disposition effect.