Fernando Chague

professor of finance at the São Paulo School of Economics

curriculum vitae: english, portuguese (lattes)

email: fernando.chague | at | fgv.br

research interests: short-selling, day-trading, behavioral biases, household finance, emerging markets, empirical finance

research

working papers:


Are some investors prone to behavioral biases? We find that retail investors who forget to take advantage of a simple tax break opportunity in Brazil also display more biases. Our results support theories that relate investor's inattention to behavioral biases.


Broker's equity lending desks have a privileged position: they talk every day to short-sellers in the over-the-counter lending market. Consistent with prior evidence showing information leakage by financial intermediaries, we find that clients from brokers that are connected to informed short-sellers trade in the same direction and benefit from short-seller's superior information. 


How can one show that "the salience of a firm by itself induces retail investors" to buy the stock? The problem with traditional proxies for salience (abnormal volume, news, internet search, social media interest) is that they can correlate with firm's fundamentals. We show that the simple presence of a store in a small town from a brick-and-mortar firm makes the stock of that firm three times more likely to be day-traded by the local retail investors. The effects are stronger for the firms that have the same storefront name than their listing name in the Brazilian Stock Exchange. Since there is no information to be gathered at local stocks for day-trading, we argue our results are consistent with (visual) salience inducing retail trading.


There is solid evidence showing that retail investors end up holding stocks with falling prices. This is the result of a combination of several behaviors: contrarian investing, preference for distressed stocks, preference for lottery like-stocks and the disposition effect. In this paper, we use detailed data to discipline (i) a reduced-form contrarian retail demand and (ii) an equation that limits arbitrageurs. Then, we show that (i) and (ii) can produce severe overpricing of popular high-risk stocks.


Can one make a living day trading stocks? In this short note, we hope to inform retail investors who are thinking about leaving their jobs and become day traders. We base our evidence using high-quality data from the entire universe of Brazilian retail investors who decided  to do just that. 


published papers:


Some claim that there is no equity risk premium in Brazil; they arrive at such conclusion after looking at stock returns and risk-free rates from the mid 1990's until now. We argue that if we imposed the same data limitation to the US, we could arrive at the same puzzling result. Conclusion: if you want to use realized returns to infer the size of the Brazilian equity risk premium, you better wait a couple more years...


Short-sellers are informed investors who make prices more efficient. However, they are restricted by the frictions in the equity lending market; the equity lending market is an over-the-counter markets with opaque prices (i.e. loan fees). We explore a transparency shock that took place in the Brazilian equity lending market in March, 2011, to show that a less opaque equity lending market results in more trading volume, lower loan fees, and improved stock price efficiency. We conclude by suggesting regulators to adopt "loan-fee benchmarks" as an effective way of improving transparency in equity lending markets worldwide.


Aggregate short-selling predicts future returns, but what can we say about individual short-sellers? Relying on individual trading data on both opening and closing of lending positions by all Brazilian short-sellers, we find that 30% of short-selling volume comes from investors who are able to profit consistently. The evidence of superior performance is consistent out-of-sample (both over time and across stocks), an indication of skill. Finally, we examine what the skilled short-sellers do different; among other things, they are more likely to pick already losing stocks (i.e., momentum investors) as opposed to correcting overpricings.


Short-sellers have to borrow the stock they want to sell short in the equity lending market, an over-the-counter market. The price they will pay to borrow the stock is not clear, however. We show that those short-sellers who are well connected to brokers, who in turn are well connected to lenders, are able to pay lower loan fees. Our results are consistent with search costs being an important source of price variation in opaque markets.


We estimate an augmented VAR model for a system that includes not only the Nelson–Siegel factors of the Brazilian yield curve, but also the principal components of a large number of macroeconomic and financial indicators. The main finding is that forward-looking variables, such as market expectations about inflation and GDP, are crucial to improve short-term forecasts of the yield curve.


In a single regression, we test the two main hypothesis concerning short-sellers: (H1) short-sellers are informed investors and their trading activity predicts lower stock prices; (H2) when short-sellers face restrictions and there is dispersion of opinion, stocks become overpriced. We find that both are true: short-sellers are informed but at times restricted.


published papers in Brazilian journals:


Structured products designed for Brazilian retail investors have negative expected excess returns.


We provide an update on the odds of day trading stocks for a living using reliable data.


We show that retail investors trade stocks that released "information-void" news.


We propose a VIX measure for the Brazilian stock market. You can download the "IVOL-BR" time-series here: https://nefin.com.br/data/volatility_index.html


We implement a text-reading algorithm that reads COPOM meetings minutes and produces an "optimist factor" that predicts changes in the term structure of interest rates.


education

PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2012

MA, São Paulo School of Economics FGV, Brazil, 2007 

BA, University of São Paulo, Brazil, 2003

teaching


Brazilian stock market risk-factors


check out the nefin webpage for data on Brazilian stock market: