Long Term Price Momentum, Early, and Late Strategies in Indian Market Stock Return

Abstract

In recent days price momentum has gained considerable attention among the financial market researchers, as it deals with simple trading strategies offering abnormal returns based on historical market informations. However there is scarcity of works in this line of research in emerging markets. This paper investigates the long horizon relationship between historical trading volume and momentum return in Indian stock market, which is one of the most promising emerging markets. We also investigate the profitability of early-stage and late-stage strategies in Indian context. Our sample contains the blue-chip stocks represented in BSE-100 index over a period of eight years starting from August 2004 to July 2012. The study created double-sorted portfolios for measuring the volume based price momentum returns by applying Lee and Swaminathan (2000) methodology, which necessitated measuring the differences in the momentum return of low and high trading volume stocks. Our results suggest that there is no role for historical trading volume in boosting the magnitude of momentum profits over long horizon portfolios. Our findings also shows that neither long-term price momentum nor long term price reversal strategy are pronounced in early-stage and late-stage respectively.