Private Placement, Investor Sentiment, and Stock Price Anomaly

Abstract

The private placement of A-shares gained momentum with the release of the Administrative Measures for Securities Issuance of Listed Companies in 2006. This led to enhanced research on the impact of private placement on stock prices. In 2012, the Chinese government relaxed the requirements for directed issuance of listed companies, resulting in a surge of directed issuance since then. This study uses a sample of listed companies that conducted private placements in the A-share market between 2013 and 2021, to analyze the impact of investor sentiment on stock price differences after private placements from the perspective of short and long-term excess returns. This study constructs the non-main investor sentiment of individual stocks using high-frequency tick data of individual stocks and explores the relationship between this stock price anomaly and investor sentiment using multiple regression analysis. The results show a positive short-term announcement effect of A-share private placements, with the excess return rate occurring mainly before the plan announcement date. The stock price difference from the plan announcement date to ten trading days thereafter has a significantly negative relationship with the excess return rate. Furthermore, investor sentiment in private placements may negatively affect long-term stock performance. This study suggests that this phenomenon is caused by higher investor sentiment pushing stock prices upward in the short term, causing them to deviate from fundamentals, creating mispricing, and then driving them back to fundamentals, with information disclosure. After controlling for the severity of information disclosure, the effect of investor sentiment on long-term stock price performance becomes insignificant.