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Losing Money on the Marginjebosubmission_AC_Edit.pdf (2.43 MB)

Losing Money on the Margin

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journal contribution
posted on 2020-02-25, 10:23 authored by Daniel Ladley, Guanqing Liu, James Rockey
Margin trading is popular with retail investors around the world. To limit the scale of these investors’ potential losses, regulators impose a system of collateral requirements and margin calls. We show in this paper, however, that the collateral requirement imposed by margin calls results in negative expected returns for these traders whilst also inducing positive skew in the returns distribution. Investments in assets with symmetric returns, when traded on margin, instead offer limited losses and a small chance of a large gain, much like lottery stocks and other gambles. We demonstrate this theoretically and then show empirically, using a unique database of account data from a Chinese retail brokerage, that the realized losses of margin traders are often substantial. This leads us to question whether current regulation is appropriate.

History

Citation

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization Volume 172, April 2020, Pages 107-136

Alternative title

Margin Trading: Hedonic Gains, Real Losses

Author affiliation

School of Business

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Volume

172

Publisher

Elsevier

issn

0167-2681

Acceptance date

2020-01-27

Available date

2021-09-03

Language

en

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