Abstract:We analyze the relationship between personality traits and stock market participation. Our sample comes from combining personality trait scores and socioeconomic status information from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 with data from Finnish Central Securities Depository, the official register of stock holdings in Finland. We find the traits, and especially the subscales of the traits, to be significant predictors of stock market participation. In particular, exploratory excitability, extravagance, sentimentality, and dependence have large effects. One-standard-deviation changes in the subscale scores have marginal effects of up to 4 percentage points on the probability of participating in the stock market.

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This study focuses on non-institutional trading behaviour around interim earnings announcements in the emerging market. We separate the stock trading activity of Finnish households into five trading classes and compare the results to institutional trading. Data covering the years 1996-2000 shows that earnings news triggers trading in every trading class. We also find some evidence that actively trading individuals especially (compared to passively trading ones) show increased buying and selling activity before the event compared to the non-event period. After the event we find that Finnish households in the most active investor class tend to follow a contrarian strategy, especially selling after good news. This adds to previous evidence by Grinblatt and Keloharju (2000b) . Furthermore, the performance of the active investor classes is superior to that of passive ones. Finally, the institutional trading class is clearly less affected by the announcement than the active investor classes, suggesting that institutions utilize a broader information set than individual investors. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2006.

This paper provides new evidence on the information content of losses in the relation between stock returns and annual accounting earnings. Consistent with earlier US evidence, accounting losses are not significantly related to stock returns in Finland. Moreover, it is shown that the different methods used to measure earnings in Finland affect the frequency of losses, substantially altering the estimated return-earnings relation. The results suggest that earnings adjusted in accordance with the recommendations of the Finnish Committee for Corporate Analysis are not more useful than the unadjusted reported earnings in explaining stock returns in Finland.

Recently, Martikainen, Perttunen, and Ziemba (henceforth, MPZ) (1 994) investigated the regularity of the TOM effect in 24 stock markets and 12 different regional indices of the world. They reported that the TOM effect exists for most countries as well as for regions. However, the TOM effect seemed not to exist in some small stock markets, such as those of Finland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia.We are grateful to Lasse Jaaskelainen, Arto Laakkonen, Ricardo Leal, the participants of the 1 s t Annual Conference on Multinational Financial Issues in Atlantic City, and two anonymous JFM referees for useful comments. All remaining errors are ours. 'In his pioneering work, Ariel (1987) found that the returns of U.S. Stocks were larger at the TOM than in the rest of the month for the period of 1963-1981. His results have been supported by, cg.CCC 0270-731 4/95/060605-11 'A major Finnish business newspaper, Kairppalehti, and the leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, discussed the seasonality in their stock market commentaries on October 1, 1993, and September 28, 1993, respectively. 3Exceptions are the studies by Lakonishok and Maberly (1990) and Martikainen and Puttonen (1993). who investigate volume figures in connection with the day-of-the-week effect.

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