Disposition effect in currency trading: an evidence from experimental student games

Abstract

The disposition effect has been described in the stock-investing context as a behavioral tendency of investors to hold on to losing stocks for too long and sell winning stocks too soon. In this paper it is examined whether the disposition effect can be confirmed also in the experimental student game of currency trading data set. The presence of the disposition effect leads to the conclusion that students, despite using demo money, were trading with real behavioral bias and various interesting findings concerning gender differences and size of the trade are discussed. The experimental data set was collected by Jochec during years 2009 to 2015, students were trading under standardized rules. In this paper the holding periods of profitable and unprofitable trades were tested and compared. Based on these calculations the general presence of the disposition effect in the data set was confirmed. Moreover it was confirmed that males and females have different tendency to succumb to this bias.