A new attention proxy and order imbalance: Evidence from China

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new direct proxy for investors' attention in the Chinese stock market: daily abnormal reading quantity of each stock's posts on the Eastmoney guba website. Using A-shares samples of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, we find that our proposed proxy (i) is significantly correlated to existing attention proxies; (ii) leads to contemporarily high returns and long-time reversal; (iii) is related to heterogeneous trading behaviour of different investors. In summary, we add value to the field of investor attention approximation with a new and efficient measure that can be useful for guiding and modelling investor's trading.