Retail equity investors in India systematically lose to other categories of players because they sell winning stocks too quickly and hold on to losing stocks too long, says a study.
It found individual retail investors in India, numbering 2.02 million, largest in the world, consistently chase a zero rate of return on their stock investments when they make decisions themselves.
The study attributed the recurring losses for these type of investors to the 'disposition effect' (selling the winning stocks too quickly and holding on to the losing stocks too long) and 'overconfidence' (taking credit for good decisions and attributing bad decisions to luck) for three categories of investors separately.
The study by Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business was conducted under the leadership of Sankar De, executive director at the Centre for Analytical Finance, ISB.
It is based on the daily trade data of 2.5 million retail investors (given by NSE) who collectively carried out 1.4 billion trades, with a total value of Rs 37 trillion between January 2005 and June 2006, and is touted as the largest sample used in an empirical study in behavioural finance. "We estimate that individual retail investors lost close to Rs 83.76 billion during the sample period of 18 months, from January 2005 to June 2006, or Rs 55.84 billion per year," De said while releasing the report here today. These losses are equivalent to 0.77 per cent of the country's gross domestic savings a year, said the study titled 'Do retail investors in India make rational investment and portfolio decisions? The findings are based on the NSE data during the period and looked at the behavioural biases, investor performance and wealth transfer between investor groups. "The total number of investors who traded at least once during this period is 2.5 million, or 0.22 per cent of the population. Put differently, 0.22 per cent of the country's population lost 0.77 per cent of the total gross domestic savings during this period," De said. The figures are just the trading losses and do not include commissions, taxes and market impact losses, he added. The co-authors of the study, funded by Citigroup and Goldman Sachs foundations, are Bhimasankaram Pochiraju, Naveen Reddy and Rahul Chhabra.
