as they tie expectations of future growth to past
bad (good) growth/earnings; hence, they put
excessive weight on the recent past for prediction
of future returns. They oversell the stocks that
have recently performed poorly and overbuy
the stocks that have performed well. Therefore,
these stocks are either underpriced and have
a high BM, or overpriced and have a low BM.
This mispricing explanation implies that typical
investors make systematic errors in predicting
future growth earnings of stocks; therefore, one
can exploit the mistakes of typical investors by
purchasing high BM stocks and shorting low BM
stocks. This is a common judgment error and
may explain the investor preference of low BM
stocks (growth stocks) over high BM stocks (value
stocks). Their empirical evidence also suggests that
institutional investors prefer low BM stocks over
high BM stocks, and are willing to pay them at a
premium price because they represent prudent
investments. LaPorta (1996) also supports this
mispricing explanation.
Investors are often the victims of the mispricing
effect. They often estimate firm’s future prospect
from past performance while ignoring the tendency
of corporate profit growth to revert to the mean.
Fuller et al. (1993) explain that earnings growth
rates tend to revert to the mean quickly because
of the nature of the capital markets. They find
that, although earnings per share (EPS) growth rate
of high price-to-earnings (PE) group substantially
exceeds that of low PE group in the first year
of portfolio formation, it converges closely to
the mean after only 4 years. Stated differently,