Income, trading, and performance: Evidence from retail investors

Journal of Empirical Finance
Author

Bui, D. G., I. Hasan, C.-Y. Lin, and R.-X. Zhai

Published

March 1, 2022

Abstract

We examine whether household income influences the trading styles of retail investors and their investment performance. To investigate this question, we use a unique dataset of branch-level trading that contains all retail investors and observe that those investors with high income trade more and earn significantly higher returns in the stock market. In addition, this income effect becomes stronger for highly risky stocks, such as gambling or lottery-like stocks. These findings are in line with the information model theorized by Peress (2004) in which wealthy investors take extra risks by trading more stocks.