Do individual traders undermine firm valuation?

Abstract

Studies find that noise traders create unhedgeable risks, and individuals have long been suspected of making suboptimal and uninformed trading decisions. Recent arguments suggest using the individual trading weight to proxy for noise trader risk when pricing common and preferred stocks in emerging markets. We empirically corroborate that individual traders undermine the relative valuations of listed firms in South Korea. This result is robust to controlling for corporate governance, institutional monitoring efforts, firm size, accounting ratios, idiosyncratic volatility, liquidity measures, and endogeneity. © 2020 Elsevier Inc.