Small market capitalization

Question

Why would stocks perform better in the month of January than other months of the year, and discuss whether small market capitalization companies outperform large capitalization companies in the short to medium term?

Answer 1

January effect is the calendar-related anomaly in the financial market where financial security prices raise in the month of January. This makes an opportunity for the investors to buy stock for lower prices before January and sell them after their value rises. Therefore, the main characteristics of the January Effect are an increase in buying securities before the end of the year for a lower price, and selling them in January to produce profit from the price differences. This kind of pattern in price behavior on the financial market supports the fact that financial markets are not completely efficient.The January effect is perhaps the most accepted seasonal anomaly. In an early paper, Rozeff and Kinney (1976) found evidence for abnormally high returns in January using returns on the NYSE index between 1904 and 1974. The most popular explaination for this is the well known tax-loss selling motivation. Because the high correlation of international stock markets with the US market one would expect to that the January effect in the US data is transmitted towards international data. Between 1960 and 1976 the average January return was 0.14%. In this period the returns in January were significantly higher than in other months. Between 1976 and 2003, January essentially generated the same average return as any other day (t¼ 0.37). Right after 1976, the year of the publication of Rozeff and Kinney (1976) report about the January effect, the strength of the effect dropped immensely.