Contrarian Investment Strategies on the Swedish Stock Market

Henriette Wennicke

Master Thesis

Copenhagen Business School

M.Sc. in Finance and Strategic Management

Department of Finance

October 2008

Executive Summary

For decades academics and investment professionals have argued that value strategies outperform growth strategies. Value strategies are identified as strategies where stocks with low prices relative to earnings, cash earnings, book value and other measures of fundamental value are bought, to be able to generate abnormal returns. In general, there is almost universal agreement among researchers on the existence of the value premium in stock returns. The issue of underlying causes for the value premium is far more contentious.

The objective of this thesis is to examine whether the value-phenomenon is present on the Swedish stock market, which is the largest market in the Nordic region. Additionally the thesis explores whether value strategies yield higher returns due to increased risk or irrational behavior of market participants.

The value-phenomenon is indeed present in the Swedish stock market. Accounting and stock market data have been collected for stocks in the OMXS30 index since 1987 and onwards. Value and growth portfolios have been formed based on different sorting variables; Price-to- earnings (P/E), Price-to-cash earnings (P/C), Price-to-book (P/B) and Asset growth (ASSETG). The test and analysis of the four different strategies with either one-, two- or three-year holding periods show that the value strategy in general outperforms the growth strategy on the Swedish stock market. Thus, most of the strategies produce returns that are insignificant, which might however be a consequence of the small sample size. The value premium for the one-year value-weighted strategy is between -1.082% and 7.233%. When the stocks within theportfolios are equally-weighted, the premiums become even stronger and more significant, which might be due to small-cap effects. The same pattern is found when the holding periods were extended to two and three years.

The risk based explanation is analyzed, but it does not seem to explain the value premium. The traditional systematic risk measure beta is on average lower for value portfolios than for growth portfolios, which totally contradicts the traditional finance theory. Additionally the value strategy does not perform worse in bad states of the economy, which otherwise could have indicated that the value stocks had increased downside risk.

The irrational arguments seem to fit the existence of the value premium better. Investors are subject to several kinds of judgment biases, which originate from limited cognitive capacity. Therefore different types of heuristics are used that can limit the investors’ ability to make rational decisions. Incorrect usage of heuristics can encourage investors to extrapolate past performance too far into the future. When performing a simple extrapolation test on the Swedish stock market it is found that the net profit growth ahead of portfolio formation is slightly negative for the value portfolio, whereas net profit after formation is slightly positive. The picture is the opposite for the growth portfolio. The results indicate that markets undervalue value stocks and overvalue growth stocks, which lead to a positive performance of value stocks when the market participants realize that their view of growth stocks have been too optimistic and their view of value stocks too pessimistic.

Introduction

 Contrarian investment strategies have been known for decades and have for long been awidespread investment style. Several financial studies have proved significantly superior performance of the contrarian strategies and thus the existence of the value premium. This is achieved when investors buy underpriced stocks and short overpriced stocks. The underpriced stocks are referred to as the loser or value stocks, while the overpriced stocks are often called winners or growth stocks.

Studies by (Lakonishok, Shleifer, & Vishny, 1994), (Fama & French, 1996) and (Chan & Lakonishok, 2004) provide evidence of the existence of the value premium in the US stock markets. Further do (Chan, Hamao, & Lakonishok, 1991) find superior performance of investment strategies based on value styles in Japanese stock market and (Fama & French, 1998) document persistent evidence of value premium in international stock markets including the Swedish one. Thus, there is almost universal agreement on the existence of the value premium in stock returns (Sharma, Hur, & Lee, 2008). The issue of underlying causes for the value premium is far more contentious. In a number of articles Fama and French argue that markets are efficient and that the better performance of the value investing is due to value stocks being more risky. However in the articles by Lakonishok et al. no evidence is found that value stocks are riskier than growth stocks. They use several risk measures in their documentation. Instead they argue that the value premium could be best explained by preference of investors for growth stocks over value stocks. They argue that investors are likely to suffer from cognitive biases, extrapolate past growth rates of glamour stocks and buy them at whatever price. Further growth stocks can often be justified as prudent investments in contrast to many value stocks, which appear financial distressed. Moreover they argue that the contrarian strategy is a long-term strategy, which means that the value premium is only realized in the long run, which might frighten some investors. Therefore in all researchers are in much disagreement when it comes to the reason for the value premium. Some still rely on traditional financial theories while others look for explanations in the behavior finance literature.

Objective

The objective of this thesis is to test the contrarian investment strategies on the Swedish stock market with the methodologies developed by Lakonishok et al. (1994). The superior performance of the strategy has been proved on several markets, and therefore it will be interesting to see, whether similar results can be documented on the Swedish stock market. The Swedish stock market is the largest in the Nordic region, but no former research has been made recently on this market. On the Danish market the strategy has proved its worth and it will be interesting to see if it also can be implemented on the neighboring market in Sweden. It would be surprising if the strategy did not work on the Swedish stock market because of its success on other markets. However, if it works properly it would indicate that on the whole the Swedish stock market is very similar to the global stock market.

Some opponents of the strategy argue that the results for the value premiums are sample specific and cannot be transmitted to other markets or time periods. Therefore the overall objective is to analyze and test whether the value premium found in other markets is also present on the Swedish stock market the last 20 years. Consequently, the evidence presented in this thesis will either confirm or reject the results found in other studies on other markets in other time periods and thereby prove or disprove that the results are due to data mining.

Problem statement

The above introduction to former studies and the objective statement give rise to a number of questions. The overall purpose of the thesis is:  To investigate whether a consistent value premium exists on the Swedish stock market and study whether this potential premium is due to increased risk or irrational behavior of market participants.

In order to answer the above problem statement I have identified the sub questions presented in the following. Researchers disagree very much when it comes to explaining the cause of the value premium. The first research question therefore aims at comparing the traditional financial theory with the behavioral theory, so it can be determined what the problems are with the traditional explanation.

-        Can the underlying assumption of investor rationality from the standard finance theory be questioned?

When both the traditional finance theory and the behavioral finance theory have been introduced briefly, the contrarian investment strategy will be introduced, outlining how it works and introducing former studies that have proved its worth.

-        How do contrarian investment strategies work in practice?

After the introduction to the underlying theories an empirical study will be performed on the Swedish stock market.

-        Does the Swedish stock market mean revert?

-        Can the contrarian investment strategies be carried out successfully on the Swedish stock market?

Finally the results will be explained with both the traditional and behavioral finance theories.

-        Can traditional risk measures explain the results obtained or do we have to search for the explanation in alternative theories like behavioral finance?

These questions will be investigated and answered thought out the paper and in the final conclusion. When differences and similarities to results presented in other studies are found they will be outlined and investigated.

1.2 Methodology

In the following the methodology used in the thesis will be presented. A more detailed discussion of the methodology and theories used in the tests and analysis will be presented in the later chapters wherever relevant.

1.2.1 Limitation

The purpose of this thesis is not to create a new theory, but rather to use the theory already developed and use this empirically on an existing but not yet investigated market. Therefore the empirical analysis is made as realistic as possible. However, taxes and transaction costs are not taken into consideration. Therefore no considerations are made whether the conclusions are  the same in a world of taxes and transaction costs. I investigate the contrarian investment strategy on the Swedish market with reference to other former studies of other markets. No investigation is made to check whether these former analyses are made correctly and without errors.

I have chosen to investigate standard and behavioral finance in regard to the contrarian investment strategy based on stocks. Accordingly, I do not investigate other corporate finance issues like for instance irrational investor behavioral in regard to bonds, derivatives or real investments. Since traditional finance is well known and the theoretical foundation have been taught and elaborated upon for decades, the emphasis will not be on this building block. I assign one minor section to standard finance in order to clarify the contrast to behavioral finance, and put my emphasis on the behavioral finance theory. This contrast is pointed out through the thesis wherever relevant.

The thesis should not be seen as a test of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), even though it is discussed in Chapter 2. Whether the obtained results can lead to a rejection of the hypothesis or not is not possible to answer with the test performed in the thesis. Therefore this hypothesis will not be rejected or accepted or further discussed.

The accounting variables used in the tests could be affected by changes in accounting regulations and errors in the Datastream database, but these kinds of biases will not be investigated in detail due to the limited scope of this thesis. However, a subchapter concerning data problems is included.

Structure

The thesis is structured with the objective of continuation between the chapters. Chapter 2 and 3 involve theories and empirical findings of others, whereas Chapter 4 involves my own study and Chapter 5 an explanation of the obtained results through the introduced theoretical framework. The sub-sections within each chapter are summarized when appropriate due to the length or complexity of the contents. Furthermore, all the chapters finish with a sub conclusion to emphasize the most important findings within each chapter. Figure 1.1 below presents the outline of the thesis.

Theoretical foundation

The theories used throughout the thesis originate mainly from literature such as articles, journals and working papers. The majority of the literature was found via the Internet through different journal databases. The huge numbers of articles on the subject expose the user to the risk of missing relevant and high-quality literature. However, after spending several hours searching and classifying the relevant literature, I am confident that I have uncovered the most important literature on the subject, often written by highly acknowledged authors. Further, most of the applied literature has been published in well-known and reliable media.

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EVIDENCE TO THE CONTRARY: EXTREME WEEKLY RETURNS ARE UNDERREACTIONS

A Dissertation

by

ERIC KYLE KELLEY

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of

Texas A&M University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 2004

Major Subject: Finance

ABSTRACT

The finding of reversals in weekly returns has been attributed to a combination of microstructure issues and overreaction to information. I provide new evidence eliminating overreaction as a source of reversal. I show that well-known weekly contrarian profits are followed by a long run of momentum profits. In fact, these profits are strong enough to produce a significant momentum effect over the full year following portfolio formation. Thus, the market does not appear to view extreme weekly returns as excessive, as implied by an overreaction story. To the contrary, this return continuation is consistent with underreaction to the news driving extreme weekly returns. This is supported by cross-sectional tests in which I find this week’s news is positively related to next week’s returns. The evidence presented here is consistent with growing evidence that underreaction to firm-specific information is a pervasive feature of price formation.  Therefore, if any short-run contrarian profits can be realized, they are better viewed as compensation for providing liquidity than as a reward for arbitrage.

INTRODUCTION

Short-run individual stock returns reverse immediately. Lehmann (1990) finds that contrarian strategies which buy stocks with low weekly returns and sell stocks with high weekly returns generate positive profits over the following week. Jegadeesh (1990) shows that a one-month contrarian strategy is also profitable. This reversal pattern has spawned much discussion over the past decade. Is it due to time variation in risk premia? Is it due to market inefficiencies? Is it spurious? Lehmann highlights that return predictability over such a short horizon cannot plausibly be attributed to time variation in risk premia.1 That leaves the debate to focus on spuriousness or market inefficiencies as the sources of short-horizon predictability.

Bid-ask bounce and nonsynchronous trading are sources of spurious reversals in returns. Kaul and Nimalendran (1990) and Conrad, Kaul, and Nimalendran (1991) show that part of return reversal is due to bid-ask bounce. Lo and MacKinlay (1990) and Boudoukh, Richardson, and Whitelaw (1994) note that nonsynchronous trading contributes to contrarian profits.2 Lead-lag effects and market-maker inventory control are forms of market inefficiencies that can lead to return reversal, but these are not inefficiencies due to cognitive biases. Lo and MacKinlay (1990) provide evidence that that lead-lag effects explain more than half of the contrarian profits of their strategy.

This could reflect delayed reactions of some stocks to a common factor. Jegadeesh and Titman (1995b) observe that market-makers set prices in part to control their inventory, which also induces a return reversal.3 Empirical researchers, however, have had great difficulty in establishing the above sources as the sole drivers of weekly reversals. Controlling for these sources of reversals in various ways, Jegadeesh and Titman (1995a), Cooper (1999), and Subrahmanyam (2003) conclude that contrarian profits are largely due to overreactions to firm-specific news.

With this short-run debate ensuing, other researchers have independently documented persistence in returns after many corporate events, such as unexpected earnings, dividend changes, stock repurchases, stock splits, and seasoned equity offerings, as well as after headline news and cash-flow news.4 Short-run reversals and the conclusion that the market is overreacting are curious in light of the evidence of such perceived underreaction to firm-specific news. In this dissertation, I attempt to reconcile this conflict.

The duration of the return reversal found by Lehmann (1990) and Jegadeesh (1990) is less than four weeks, while the continuations following firm-specific news last up to a year. Therefore, I begin my analysis by extending the holding period of portfolios similar to those used in the short-run literature. Suppose the weekly return reversal is due solely to microstructure issues and not in any way to an intrinsic overreaction to firm-specific news. Suppose also that, as the news literature suggests, there generally is an underreaction to firm-specific news. Since the microstructure effects should dissipate in a few weeks, we should expect to see a continuation in returns once the microstructure issues fade if the market is actually underreacting to news in the formation week.

Consistent with prior studies, I find that a strategy that buys weekly extreme winners and sells weekly extreme losers generates negative profits in the first four weeks of the holding period (one can simply reverse the sign to get contrarian profits). The profits to these weekly portfolios behave quite differently, however, after four weeks.

My key finding is that extreme weekly returns in fact persist for roughly a year once the brief return reversal dissipates. This continuation in returns is robust and steady across the subsequent weeks. Moreover, the continuation easily offsets the brief reversal that follows portfolio formation. In other words, the fifty-two-week post-formation period displays no evidence of a correction. In sum, my findings are inconsistent with an overreaction to news occurring in the formation period.

Additionally, I not only find that the subsequent continuation in returns offsets the initial reversal; I find that the continuation dominates. Across the fifty-two weeks following portfolio formation, the winners continue to outperform the losers. So I find evidence of underreaction. This finding is consistent with the evidence of continuation in returns following firm-specific news, mentioned above. This consistency is remarkable given that the extant literature paints a complexity of reversal and  momentum patterns, with reversal in the short-run, momentum in the intermediate-run, and reversal again in the long-run.

This new evidence provides some consistency across the short-run predictability and post-event drift literatures. However, it is still interesting that the event literature rarely documents any immediate reversal. In fact, there is direct evidence of no significant reversal immediately following six of the eight events Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam (1998) associate with post-event drift. Appendix I provides a list of studies documenting such evidence. In light of this, I consider a subset of the main strategy with earnings announcements during the formation week. These stocks experience both an extreme return and a specific news announcement. After controlling for bid-ask bounce, I find (i) no immediate reversal and (ii) strong return continuation for a full year. Thus, it appears that in this subset strategy the strength of the news offsets any pressure to reverse even in week one.

Pursuing this result further and in a more general context, I find that the initial reversal in returns is not attributable to abnormal firm-specific residual returns (standardized residuals), which I interpret as firm-specific news. Instead, the reversals are strongly related to total returns, consistent with the reversals being due only to microstructure issues. Holding last week’s returns constant, I find a positive relation between last week’s news (standardized residual) and this week’s return. Hence, realizable profits to weekly contrarian strategies, if any, are better viewed as compensation for providing liquidity to the market, rather than as a reward for arbitrage. While some researchers have challenged the overreaction interpretation of weekly reversals, they have been unable to show that microstructure effects can fully explain contrarian profits. Estimating the microstructure effects though is very difficult to do. I contribute to the literature by, in a sense, stepping back and making an observation using a longer window. This approach addresses the source of reversals without explicitly measuring various microstructure effects. The performance of the extreme-weekly return stocks over a long window refutes the overreaction hypothesis.

This dissertation also contributes to a growing body of research suggesting return persistence is a pervasive feature of the price formation process. In concert with the momentum and post event drift literatures, Vuolteenaho (2002) and Chan (2003) provide general evidence of a delayed response to news identified over a monthly horizon.  Gutierrez and Pirinsky (2004) show large news shocks measured over periods as short as a month and as long as three years is associated with drift that never reverses. My findings round out this picture of return persistence. Patterns of return predictability across time horizons and events are consistent with each other and perhaps much simpler than originally perceived. The only effect of firm-specific news on future returns is that of continuation.

The remainder of this dissertation is organized as follows. Section II contains a detailed literature review, primarily focusing on return-based predictability. Section III  describes the data and portfolio construction. Section IV presents empirical results and robustness tests. Section V concludes.

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Contrarian Investment Strategies: An Assessment of the Value Premium in context to Recessions

Thesis written by

Rebekka Petersen

&

Philip Arnstedt

Copenhagen Business School

Finance & Strategic Management

Institute of Finance

Counseling by Ole Risager

October 2010

Executive Summary

Contrarian investment strategies have been present for decades, generating superior returns for the investors. Investors who follow the contrarian investment strategy are known as value investors. Value investors follow a strategy where stocks with low prices relative to book value and other measures of fundamental value are bought, to be able to generate abnormal returns.

The magnitude of the value premium is huge and it has been persistent on the American stock market. We have investigated how the value premium performs in general and around recessions in order to draw conclusions on the strategy that a value investor should follow when the economy is faced with a recession. We have found that the value premium, sorted on Book-to-Market values, exists throughout our period of investigation from 1947 until 2009 on the American stock market, generating an average quarterly premium of more than 3 % for the investor. We have also found that the value premium is skewed towards the right, implying that value stocks have a higher upside potential than growth stocks.

On average in the four quarters prior to recessions the quarterly value premium is 0.92 %. During the 11 different recessions in our time period of investigation, we found that the average quarterly value premium is 1.37 %. Therefore, we come to the conclusion that value stocks perform worse prior to recessions and during recessions than on average. We have also found that in the four quarters after recessions the value premium is positive in ten out of 11 different recessions, which indicates that there is a clear tendency towards higher returns on value stocks after recessions. The average quarterly value premium is 5.95 %.

We have established that the standard finance theory does not explain the value premium. The traditional systematic risk measure, beta, is on average lower for our value portfolio than for our growth portfolio. This completely contradicts the traditional finance theory.  We believe that the explanation is found within the behavioral finance theory. Investors are subject to several kinds of decision biases, which originate from limited cognitive capacity. We expect that as long as naive investors are challenged by limited cognitive capacity and keep extrapolating past performance into the future the value premium will continue to exist, hence generating possibilities for the value investors.

Introduction

For many years, contrarian investment strategies has been utilized and discussed. Recent, financial researchers have found statistical evidence of a superior return on these strategies. Investors who follow the contrarian investment strategy are often known as value investors because they attempt to buy stocks that are underpriced and sell stocks that are overpriced.

The theory of value investing‘ was formulated by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd as early as  1934 and is based on the assumption that two values are attached to all companies. The first is the market price – the value of the company on the stock exchange. The second is a company‘s intrinsic value. Value investors look for securities with prices that are unjustifiably low based on their intrinsic worth. The intrinsic value is sometimes referred to as the business value. The business value can be interpreted as the value of the company in the event of a merger, a takeover situation, or the amount that could be achieved by breaking up the company and selling all its assets. For long-term investors, business value is the stream of future dividends.

Most often, intrinsic worth is estimated by analyzing a company's fundamentals. Like a bargain hunter, the value investor seeks assets that are beneficial and of high quality but underpriced. In other words, the value investor searches for stocks that he/she believes are undervalued by the market. Like the bargain hunter, the value investor tries to find those items that are valuable but not recognized as such by the majority of other buyers. As the prominent value investor Warren Buffet declares, ”It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.”

In order for the value investor to be successful it requires that the market is inefficient. The key question for many researchers is therefore to establish, whether the superior returns on contrarian investment strategies compensate for a higher fundamental risk or if the returns in fact are better because naive investors systematically perceive some companies‘ future performance as being too high compared to reality.

Considering the vast amount of empirical support, on the existence of excess return on value stocks, it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between the excess return, also known as the value premium, and the periodic changes in the economy as a whole. The world economy faces downturns and upturns. This nature of contractions and expansions is known as either recessions or booms.

During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators follow the same path. Production as measured by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, investment spending, household income, business profits and inflation all fall during recessions, while bankruptcies and the rate of unemployment rises. The opposite is true during a boom.

The majority of recessions have been anticipated by declines in the stock market. Earlier academic studies acknowledge that the value premium also appears to diminish prior to recessions. Siegel (1994) observe that since 1948, ten recessions in America has been preceded by a stock market decline. It is often argued, by private investors, that during recessions value stocks tend to hold up better. However, when the economy starts to recover and the bottom of the market has passed, growth stocks tend to recover faster.

Therefore, it is interesting to investigate if the value premium follows the same trends. Are the returns on a value portfolio superior during recessions but inferior once the economy picks up the pace again or does the value premium defy the conventional direction. If there is any correlation between recessions and the value premium, investors might take advantage of this when deciding on entry and exit strategies in the stock market.

In other words, we will conduct an investigation on whether there is any correlation between the value premium and the cyclical nature of the world economy.

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Contrarian

Links

·        Wikipedia: Contrarian investing

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·        KULLMAN, L., 2000. … Picea abies in northern Sweden and adjacent parts of Norway. A contrarian hypothesis of postglacial …. GEOOKO-BENSHEIM-. 

·        KUMAR, A., 1999. Behavior of momentum following and contrarian market timers. Yale School of Management Working Paper. 

·        LAKONISHOK, J. and S. SMITH, A., Shleifer, and R., Vishny, 1994, Contrarian investment, extrapolation, and risk. Journal of Finance. 

·        LAKONISHOK, J., A. SHLEIFER and R.W. VISHNY, 1994. Contrarian Investment. Extrapolation, and Risk, Journal of Finance. 

·        LAKONISHOK, J., A. SHLEIFER and R.W. VISHNY, 1993. Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk. NBER Working Paper. 

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·        LAKONISHOK, S. and R.W. ANDREISHLEIFER, 1994. Vishny (1994), Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk. Journal of Finance. 

·        LEE, D.D., et al., 2003. Short-term contrarian investing�is it profitable?… Yes and No. Journal of Multinational Financial Management. 

·        LEVIS, M. and M. LIODAKIS, 2001. Contrarian Strategies and Investor Expectations: The UK Evidence. FINANCIAL ANALYSTS JOURNAL.

·        LINDH, A.G., 2003. Long-term earthquake forecasts in the San Francisco Bay area: A contrarian perspective. Eos, Transactions, American Geophysical Union. 

·        LINNAINMAA, J., Who Makes the Limit Order Book? Implications for Contrarian Strategies, Attention-Grabbing …. papers.ssrn.com. 

·        LO, A.W. and A.C. MACKINLAY, 1989. When are Contrarian Profits Due to Stock Market Overreaction?. NBER Working Paper. 

·        MACDONALD, G.J., 2004. Contrarian finding: computers are a drag on learning. Christian Science Monitor. 

·        MORRIN, M., et al., 2002. Taking Stock of Stockbrokers: Exploring Momentum versus Contrarian Investor Strategies and Profiles. Journal of Consumer Research. 

·        MUN, J.C., G.M. VASCONCELLOS and R. KISH, 2000. The Contrarian/Overreaction Hypothesis An analysis of the US and Canadian stock markets. Global Finance Journal. 

·        MUN, J.C., G.M. VASCONCELLOS and R. KISH, 1999. Tests of the Contrarian Investment Strategy Evidence from the French and German stock markets. International Review of Financial Analysis. 

·        MUN, J.C., R.J. KISH and G.M. VASCONCELLOS, 2001. The contrarian investment strategy: additional evidence. Applied Financial Economics. 

·        NAM, K., C.S. PYUN and A.C. ARIZE, 2002. Asymmetric mean-reversion and contrarian profits: ANST-GARCH approach. Journal of Empirical Finance. 

·        NAM, K., C.S. PYUN and A.C. ARIZE, 2002. Asymmetric Return Reversals and Contrarian Profits: ANST-GARCH Approach. Journal of Empirical Finance. 

·        OTCHERE, I. and J. CHAN, 2003. Short-Term Overreaction in the Hong Kong Stock Market: Can a Contrarian Trading Strategy Beat the …. The Journal of Behavioral Finance. 

·        PETERS, D.J., 1991. Using PE/Growth Ratios to Develop a Contrarian Approach to Growth Stocks. Journal of Portfolio Management. 

·        PIERPONT, C.R., 1997. A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian. New Yorker. 

·        PIOTROSKI, J.D. and D.T. ROULSTONE, 2005. Do insider trades reflect both contrarian beliefs and superior knowledge about future cash flow …. Journal of Accounting and Economics. 

·        PIRINSKY, C., 2002. Herding and Contrarian Trading of Institutional Investors.

·        PLOTT, C.R., et al., 2003. Parimutuel betting markets as information aggregation devices: experimental results. Economic Theory. 

·        PYO, H.K., 1996. The East Asian Miracle or Myth: A Reconciliation between the Conventional View and the Contrarian …. Economic Bulletin. 

·        RIDLEY, M., 1995. Down to earth: a contrarian view of environmental problems. fao.org.

·        SAMPLE, S., 2002. The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership. School Administrator. 

·        SCHIERECK, D., W. DE and M. WEBER, 1999. Contrarian and Momentum Strategies in Germany. Financial Analysts Journal. 

·        SCHULTE, D., 1996. Tailor-made and standardized therapy: Complementary tasks in behavior therapy a contrarian view. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. 

·        SCHWARTZ, P. and K. KELLY, 1996. The Relentless Contrarian. The Ottawa Citizen. 

·        SHEN, Q., A.C. SZAKMARY and S.C. SHARMA, 2005. Momentum and contrarian strategies in international stock markets: Further evidence. Journal of Multinational Financial Management.

·        SHLEIFER, A., J. LAKONISHOK and R. VISHNY, 1994. Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk. Journal of Finance. 

·        SIMMONS, A.H., 1992. Under Western Eyes: The Ludic Text.

·        SMIL, V., 1994. Some Contrarian Notes on Environmental Threats to National Security. Canadian Foreign Policy. 

·        STAUFFER, D. and J.S. S�, 2004. Simulation of Galam's contrarian opinions on percolative lattices. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications. 

·        STOLL, C., 1999. … heretic: why computers don't belong in the classroom and other reflections by a computer contrarian. … reflections by a computer contrarian/Clifford Stoll. New …. 

·        WIO, H.S., M.S. DE and J.M. L�PEZ, 2006. Contrarian-like behavior and system size stochastic resonance in an opinion spreading model. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications.

·        WOODLAND, B.M. and L.M. WOODLAND, 2000. Testing Contrarian Strategies in the National Football League. Journal of Sports Economics. 

·        YOUNG, A., 1994. Lessons from the East Asian NICS: A contrarian view. European Economic Review. 

·        YOUNG, A., 1994. Lessons from the NICs: A Contrarian View. European Economic Review. 

·        ZHONG, L.X., et al., 2005. Effects of contrarians in the minority game. Physical Review E.