Investors' previous experiences with a stock affect their willingness to repurchase it. Using Chinese investor-level brokerage data, we find that investors are less likely to repurchase stocks that have increased in value since they were sold. We then construct a novel measure of Regret to capture investors' repurchase regret and investigate its asset pricing implications. Stocks with higher Regret experience lower buying pressure from retail investors in the future, leading to lower future returns. In terms of economic magnitude, portfolios with low Regret generate 12% more annualized abnormal returns. Further analyses show that the pricing effect of Regret is more pronounced among lottery-like stocks and those in which investors have previously gained profit. The results are robust to alternative estimations.

This paper dissects the lottery-like anomaly in Chinese A-share stocks by decomposing total stock returns into overnight and intraday returns. Our findings indicate that the negative overnight returns are concentrated among lottery-like stocks, and the lottery-like anomaly is mainly driven by the overnight returns component. Considering the unique Chinese institutional features, our mechanism analysis reveals that the overnight returns induced lottery-like anomaly is more pronounced in stocks with high retail investors' gambling preference and high limits of arbitrage. Overall, our results suggest that investors optimism and trading constraints have a substantial impact on market efficiency in China.

What are the benefits to a firm of having investors with gambling preference as shareholders? Motivated by studies showing that gambling investors prefer lottery-like stocks and require lower expected returns to take risk, we hypothesize that firms with positively-skewed assets can use stock splits to attract investors with gambling preference to share risk and to lower cost of equity. Indeed, analyzing a sample of Chinese firms that split their stocks through stock dividends and using proprietary trading data to measure retail investors’ gambling preference, we find that, on average, shareholders increase by 54% and retail gambling investors increase by 119% following stock dividends. Furthermore, while firms become more risk-taking, their cost of equity declines substantially, largely due to the increased retail gambling investors’ pricing influence. Thus, stock splits are effective for improving risk-sharing efficiency, and gambling investors contribute to lowering the cost of capital.