All the News That's Fit to Reprint: Do Investors React to Stale Information?

48 Pages Posted: 3 Oct 2007 Last revised: 30 Aug 2011

See all articles by Paul C. Tetlock

Paul C. Tetlock

Columbia Business School - Finance

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: September 1, 2010

Abstract

This paper tests whether stock market investors appropriately distinguish new and old information about firms. The staleness of a news story is its textual similarity to the previous ten stories about the same firm. The tests show that firms' stock returns are less responsive to stale news. Even so, a firm's return on the day of stale news negatively predicts its return in the following week. Individual investors increase their tendencies to aggressively trade on news when news is stale. The return reversal after stale news is significantly larger in stocks with above-average individual investor trading activity on the day of the news. These results and others support the idea that individual investors overreact to stale information, leading to temporary movements in firms' stock prices. The findings are inconsistent with alternative interpretations of the empirical measure of staleness and the return reversal.

Keywords: public news, media coverage, stale information, overreaction, return reversal

JEL Classification: G12, G14

Suggested Citation

Tetlock, Paul C., All the News That's Fit to Reprint: Do Investors React to Stale Information? (September 1, 2010). AFA 2009 San Francisco Meetings Paper, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1018221 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1018221

Paul C. Tetlock (Contact Author)

Columbia Business School - Finance ( email )

665 W 130th St
Kravis Hall
New York, NY 10027
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/ptetlock/

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
1,237
Abstract Views
5,898
Rank
24,625
PlumX Metrics