Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively review a large and heterogeneous body of academic literature on investors' feedback trading, one of the most popular trading patterns observed historically in financial markets. Specifically, the authors aim to synthesize the diverse theoretical approaches to feedback trading in order to provide a detailed discussion of its various determinants, and to systematically review the empirical literature across various asset classes to gauge whether their feedback trading entails discernible patterns and the determinants that motivate them.Design/methodology/approach: Given the high degree of heterogeneity of both theoretical and empirical approaches, the authors adopt a semi-systematic type of approach to review the feedback trading literature, inspired by the RAMESES protocol for meta-narrative reviews. The final sample consists of 243 papers covering diverse asset classes, investor types and geographies.Findings: The authors find feedback trading to be very widely observed over time and across markets internationally. Institutional investors engage in feedback trading in a herd-like manner, and most noticeably in small domestic stocks and emerging markets. Regulatory changes and financial crises affect the intensity of their feedback trades. Retail investors are mostly contrarian and underperform their institutional counterparts, while the latter's trades can be often motivated by market sentiment.Originality/value: The authors provide a detailed overview of various possible theoretical determinants, both behavioural and non-behavioural, of feedback trading, as well as a comprehensive overview and synthesis of the empirical literature. The authors also propose a series of possible directions for future research.

We empirically examine whether feedback traders are active in the Bitcoin and the extent to which their presence is affected by a series of noise-related factors (sentiment; volume; liquidity) at three different frequencies (hourly; daily; weekly) for the April 2013–July 2019 period based on Bitstamp data. Our findings suggest that positive feedback trading grows stronger for higher (hourly; daily) frequencies, with its presence manifesting itself mainly during periods of high/improving sentiment and high/rising volume/liquidity. Additional tests reveal that the significance of hourly feedback trading is identified during hours corresponding to the trading hours of major European/North American markets. Overall, our results confirm extant literature evidence on the prevalence of noise trading in cryptocurrencies, while further showcasing that the factors motivating feedback trading in other asset classes (equities; ETFs; futures) exhibit similar effects over the presence of feedback traders in the cryptocurrency market.

Emerging markets have been found to accommodate higher herding levels compared to their developed counterparts, yet very little attention has been drawn to the possible impact of thin trading over herding estimations, even though these markets are often typified by thin trading. We address this issue by testing for herding in the Israeli market using the methodology proposed by Hwang and Salmon ( 2004 Hwang, S. and Salmon, M. 2004. Market stress and herding. Journal of Empirical Finance, 11: 585–616. [Crossref] [Google Scholar] ). Results indicate that correcting for thin trading renders herding more persistent and smoother in its evolution, thus indicating that thin trading leads to an underestimated picture of herding.