Googlization and retail investment decisions

Several papers have highlighted a positive link between the Google Search Volume Index (SVI) and financial markets. These studies focused mostly on market trading volume, returns, and volatility which are all publicly disclosed measures. Building on Barber and Odean (2008)'s theory of limited attention, we test whether the relationship between the SVI and trading behavior holds once we consider a sample of individual investors' transactions. We also analyze whether that relationship is affected by investors' characteristics. Our results indicate that this relationship holds for varying socio-demographic characteristics but disappears when we consider more sophisticated trading proxies.