Maxing Out: Stocks as Lotteries and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns

49 Pages Posted: 3 Sep 2008 Last revised: 27 Feb 2012

See all articles by Turan G. Bali

Turan G. Bali

Georgetown University - McDonough School of Business

Nusret Cakici

Fordham university

Robert Whitelaw

New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Multiple version iconThere are 3 versions of this paper

Date Written: February 2010

Abstract

Motivated by existing evidence of a preference among investors for assets with lottery-like payoffs and that many investors are poorly diversified, we investigate the significance of extreme positive returns in the cross-sectional pricing of stocks. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a negative and significant relation between the maximum daily return over the past one month (MAX) and expected stock returns. Average raw and risk-adjusted return differences between stocks in the lowest and highest MAX deciles exceed 1% per month. These results are robust to controls for size, book-to-market, momentum, short-term reversals, liquidity, and skewness. Of particular interest, including MAX reverses the puzzling negative relation between returns and idiosyncratic volatility recently documented in Ang et al. (2006, 2008).

Keywords: expected stock returns, maximum returns, idiosyncratic volatility, skewness

JEL Classification: G10, G11, C13

Suggested Citation

Bali, Turan G. and Cakici, Nusret and Whitelaw, Robert F., Maxing Out: Stocks as Lotteries and the Cross-Section of Expected Returns (February 2010). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1262416 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1262416

Turan G. Bali

Georgetown University - McDonough School of Business ( email )

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Nusret Cakici

Fordham university ( email )

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Robert F. Whitelaw (Contact Author)

New York University ( email )

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National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

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