Price Agnostic Demand

Abstract

We document that investors lack conviction as to what the stock market price should be, absent seeing it. Through experiments, we find that online participants, MBA students, and asset-management professionals cannot identify extreme deviations from market prices. When asked, asset-management professionals and LLMs do not think it is possible to reliably estimate the level of the market within 10\%. This suggests that return expectations and investment decisions are generally made without conviction about the prevailing market price level. We call this price agnostic demand which can help explain a number of puzzling patterns in asset prices.