This paper examines the relationship between sentiment‐apt investors and UK stock returns at industry level over the period January 1988 to December 2017. Using two new sentiment proxies (laggards to leaders and growth opportunity index) for 10 discrete sector groupings, we provide novel evidence on how returns in the UK stock market react to the activities of sentiment‐disposed investors. First, using threshold nonlinear regression, we document a significant relationship between the laggards to leaders sentiment proxy and sectoral returns. Our findings reveal that aggregate returns in the sector are affected by activities of investors who embark on profit‐taking when there is an increase in the proportion of lagging to leading stocks beyond the threshold value. Secondly, when using the growth opportunity sentiment proxy, we report that the increase in growth above the growth threshold value has a significant impact on sector returns. This study further confirms significant impact of non‐threshold variables on sector groupings. Our findings are robust, having been subjected to a range of robustness checks.

No abstract

No abstract

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, the Governor of the Bank of England, while granting an interview, described the pandemic as an unprecedented economic emergency and said that the Bank could go as far as radical moneyprinting operations. In reaction, the UK financial market, particularly the FTSE 100 and pound sterling, witnessed record-breaking losses. Considering this evidence, we hypothesized that the emotions and moods of investors towards the financial market might have been impacted by the information they obtained from frequent government policy announcements. Furthermore, we proposed that the United Kingdom's final exit from the European Union (Brexit), which coincided with the pandemic, could have worsened the outlook of the UK financial market, as investors began to diversify their portfolios. Consequently, we examined the impact of government's policy announcements on investors' reactions to the concurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic and Brexit. Our findings reveal that the psychology of investors during the pandemic was significantly shaped by frequent policy announcements, which in turn affected overall market behaviour.

No abstract