Global, Local, and Contagious Investor Sentiment

Abstract

We construct indexes of investor sentiment for six major stock markets and decompose them into one global and six local indexes. Relative market sentiment is correlated with the relative prices of dual-listed companies, validating the indexes. Both global and local sentiment are contrarian predictors of the time series of major markets' returns. They are also contrarian predictors of the time series of cross-sectional returns within major markets: When sentiment from either global or local sources is high, future returns are low on various categories of difficult to arbitrage and difficult to value stocks. Sentiment appears to be contagious across markets based on tests involving capital flows, and this presumably contributes to the global component of sentiment.