Return Seasonality in Emerging Markets: Evidence From Latin America

This chapter simultaneously investigates the most important calendar anomalies in stock returns: day of the week, turn of the month, turn of the year and holiday periods, in four of the most important Latin American stock markets: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Chile. Previous evidence available for these countries is very limited. Our results indicate that the three markets show a rather similar pattern regarding return seasonality. A day of the week effect, consisting in negative returns on Mondays, is reported for all the stock markets but the Mexican. The turn of the year effect is observed only in Argentina, and moderate holiday and turn of the month effects are reported in the Brazilian and the Mexican markets, respectively. In addition, significant levels of first-order return auto-correlation are reported for the four stock markets. The contemporary financial crisis has dramatically affected the behaviour of stock prices worldwide, causing, among other effects, a huge increase in price volatility and probably changing the behaviour of participants in financial markets. We have also investigated to what extent our results have been affected by the current abnormal situation.