Contrarian Investing in a Small Capitalization Market: Evidence from New Zealand

This paper investigates the performance of accounting–based contrarian investment strategies in the New Zealand market. The return patterns of these strategies are then related to risk–based and behavioral–based explanations of the contrarian anomaly. Based on our analysis of the risk–return characteristics of the various strategies, we attribute the first year underperformance and second year outperformance of the value portfolios to expectational errors caused by noise trading in the relatively illiquid New Zealand market. The longer two–year correction process is in contrast to the much larger and more developed U.S. and Japanese markets, where value stock price corrections have been found to occur more rapidly. This provides support for the conjecture that longer horizons are required for value strategies to pay off in imperfectly competitive markets than in competitive markets.