The financial market anomaly can be characterized as the event when observed stock returns differentiate from those expected by concrete pricing model. Many anomalies have been detected so far, and some of them vanished, while other persisted, after they had been published by academics and researchers. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the potential presence of selected types of anomalies in the financial markets and to provide relevant empirical evidence. The theoretical section will supply the reader with the descriptions of several types of financial market anomalies and the results of past studies documenting the existence of these anomalies, with possible reasons justifying the presence of this phenomenon. The analytical section will focus on the few selected anomalies and test whether they are still present in the selected financial markets.

In the first essay titled “Monthly Cyclicality in Retail Investors’ Liquidity and Lottery-type Stocks at the Turn of the Month”, we find that the well-documented underperformance of lottery stocks masks a within-month cyclical pattern. Demand for lottery stocks increases at the turn of the month especially in areas whose demographic profile resembles that of the typical lottery-ticket buyers (i.e., gamblers) driving their prices higher at the turn of the month. This effect is particularly pronounced among firms located in areas whose demographic profile resembles that of the typical lottery-ticket buyer and propelled by the within-month cyclicality of local investors’ personal liquidity positions. A long-short investment strategy based on this cyclical pattern of lottery stocks performance yields gross abnormal returns of about 15% per year. In the second essay titled “Lottery-type Stocks and Corporate Strategies at the Turn of the Month”, we test whether cyclical demand for lottery stocks by retail investors, that tends to peak at the turn-of-the-month (ToM), affects firms’ financial activities. Consistent with the notion that the peak in demand is driven by a propensity to gamble and is associated with inattention, we find underreaction to earnings news issued at the ToM by lottery-type firms located in areas with many gambling investors. We also find that the ToM also provides a window of opportunity for SEO issuing lottery-type firms. Such issuing firms may strategically choose to issue lottery-type stocks at the ToM to save the direct marketing costs because it flattens the elasticity of pre-offer demand curve.

This thesis investigates the existence of the turn-of-the-month (ToM) effect on the Swedish stock market and further examines whether this calendar anomaly is persistent but different during the Covid-19 pandemic. The main purpose of this study is to determine if the ToM effect is significant in the Swedish stock market over twelve years, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic. The major finding is that the ToM effect is statistically significant for all indexes except for the large cap. The ToM window for the mid- and all cap indexes is significant for the last four trading days of the month to the first trading day of the next month. It is also significant for the small cap index during the last four trading days of the month to the first two trading days of the next month. The results of a significant ToM effect are similar to those of prior research, except that the Swedish stock market has an earlier ToM window. The Covid-19 pandemic is divided into three windows – before the virus has reached Sweden, before vaccinations, and after vaccinations. The results indicate that the ToM effect is insignificant when Covid-19 had not yet reached Sweden. Additionally, this study discovers a significant ToM pattern in the small cap and mid cap indexes, but not for the large cap or all cap indexes before vaccinations and after vaccinations. Hence, the ToM effect is persistent but different during a time of a major crisis, which in this paper is the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The research approach is deductive and quantitative. All data is collected from Nasdaq as observations of the daily adjusted closing prices starting from 1/4/2010 to 4/22/2022, and consists of the indexes: OMXSCAPGI, OMXS30GI, OMXSSCGI, and OMXSMCGI. The daily returns are then regressed on dummy variables for the trading days, by using different ToM windows to find results if these ToM windows are significant or not.

This Study uses a period between 1939-2017 to analyse calendar anomalies on the Swedish equity market. We test whether calendar anomalies’ return deviates from the return of ordinary trading days. Our result shows that the day of the week effect, weekend effect, turn of the year, turn of the month and holiday effect have had an impact on the daily rate of return, both domestic and abroad. Similar to international markets the calendar anomalies in Sweden start to be less prominent during 1980’s. Also, our result displays that, since the 1970’s, UK holidays have had a negative impact on the daily return in Sweden. In contrast, American holidays have since the 2010’s had a positive impact. Turn of the year and turn of the month in Sweden have been more clustered around the first trading day of the year and month, compared to studies on other equity markets. Negative returns on Tuesdays, rather than Mondays, do also distinguish Sweden’s equity market relative to other markets.