Disposition Effect and Return Predictability in the Tunisian Stock Market

Abstract

The behavioral finance literature has documented that individual investors tend to sell winning stocks more quickly than losing stocks, a phenomenon known as the disposition effect, and that such a behavior has an impact on stock prices. We examined this effect in the Tunisian stock market using the unrealized capital gains/losses of Grinblatt & Han (2005) to measure the disposition effect. We find that the Tunisian investors exhibit a disposition effect in the long-run horizon but not in the short and the intermediate horizons. Moreover, the disposition effect predicts a stock price continuation (momentum) for the whole sample. However this impact varies from an industry to another. It predicts a momentum for “manufacturing” but a return reversal for “financial” and “services”.