News Sentiment indicators and the Cross‐Section of Stock Returns in the European Stock Market

This paper investigates whether the Bloomberg investor sentiment index can provide valuable information for investors and fund managers for the purposes of stock picking and portfolio selection. The dataset consists of all the listed companies in the Euro area for the period from 2010 to 2021. By exploiting portfolio sorting strategies, the paper evaluates to what extent and how long investor sentiment can affect stock returns. Moreover, it considers whether additional factors can affect the relationship between sentiment and returns, casting light on the asymmetric effect related to positive and negative news. The findings are as follows. First, high (low) sentiment stocks exhibit high (low) returns on average. The average return of the portfolio that takes a long position in the stocks with very high sentiment and a short position in stocks with very low sentiment is statistically and economically significant and is robust to the inclusion of commonly used risk factors. Second, the predictability of stock returns using the sentiment indicator declines fast after one month. Third, evidence is found of the profitability of a long-short strategy that invests in stocks with low capitalization: profitability declines with the duration of the investment period. Finally, it is found that positive news is factored into the stock price more slowly than negative news, especially for stocks with low market capitalization.