Network Investor Attention And Internet Financial Product Performance

Investors in financial markets often fail to understand and pay attention to all the information in the market due to time and energy constraints,resulting in incomplete understanding of information and deviations in asset value forecasts.Investors' understanding of market information will directly affect their investment decisions and trading behaviors,thus affecting the trading activities and prices of financial products.In the current mainstream research,most scholars use the transaction volume and price of financial products to reflect the market performance of this financial product.For Internet financial products,the price is reflected by the rate of return.In China,Internet financial products are undergoing rapid development and transformation,and the investment groups are mainly composed of small and medium-sized investors.It is not uncommon for market fluctuations caused by investors' attention.At times,investors' attention may even be regarded as the main factor that drives the trading activities of Internet financial products and the huge changes in the rate of return.Therefore,based on the previous studies,this paper innovatively constructs the Internet financial product turnover rate indicator and the volume indicator to better reflect the Internet financial product trading activities,and at the same time replace the single rate of return with the excess return rate and absolute excess return,which can more comprehensively describes the performance of Internet financial products.In the study of investors' attention,the measurement of attention is the most difficult problem.Traditional attention agent variables,including excess returns,abnormal trading volume,turnover rate,media reports,daily limit,and advertising expenditures,cannot directly measure the strength and trend of investor attention.At present,the stock forum and the Google trends index are more mainstream to directly measure the agent's attention.However,due to the large number of advertisements in the stock forum,there are more noises,and Google trends which only provides weekly data is not representative in the Chinese market.Therefore,this paper selects Baidu Index as a proxy variable to measure investor attention.Based on past research experience,this paper portrays market trading activities through the volume and turnover rate of Internet financial product,and depicts the profitability of Internet financial product by excess return rate and absolute excess return rate.In order to test the impact of network attention on Internet financial product trading activities and profitability,this paper selects 7 platforms from Wangdaitianyan A+/A,B+/B,No Rating respectively,a total of 21 platforms.The platforms(including Hongling Venture Capital,Pleasant Loan,Xiaoying Net Gold,ppmoney and other platforms)are used as a research sample to screen the daily market data of 21 platforms from June 1,2017 to June 1,2018.Compared with the stock market,the data acquisition of Internet financial product is difficult,and large-scale manual collection is required.Although the data span is only 1 year,the sample size is relatively large as a total of 7686 samples are obtained.The amount of data is considerable to ensure the reliability of the research results.This paper constructs the network attention index using the search volume of the Internet financial platform in the Baidu Index,proposes a theoretical hypothesis to construct a multiple regression model,and applies panel data regression to empirically study the impact of network attention on Internet financial product trading activities and profitability.The conclusions of this paper indicate that the current and lag period network attention based on Baidu index has significant correlation with the trading activities and yield of Internet financial product,and the impact time of network attention is shorter.The specific performance is(1)the network attention has a positive impact on the volume of Internet financial product and the turnover rate.This is mainly because investors pay more attention to information,indicating that their recognition of the disclosed information is higher.It is easier to make the corresponding decision-making response,resulting in an increase in the volume of Internet financial product and an increase in turnover;(2)network attention has a significant negative impact on the excess return rate and absolute excess return rate of Internet financial product.The increase of network attention has led to an increase in the transaction volume of Internet financial product,which has pushed up the price of Internet financial products,resulting in their revenue.The rate is reduced;(3)due to the complexity of network information,the update of information is also changing rapidly.Therefore,the influence period of influence of network attention is relatively short,and the effect on the rate of return will disappear after three periods of lag.The above empirical research will help investors to make better investment decisions when investing in Internet financial products.At the same time,it provides a certain theoretical reference for the Internet financial products industry regulatory authorities to formulate relevant regulations and policies to better protect investors' rights and interests.