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.

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.