Using the total daily amount traded exclusively by retail investors in the Brazilian stock market from 2018 to 2020, we find that online searches exhibit a strong association with the future trades of retail investors and that this relationship is observable under different market conditions. Moreover, we also document that the alternative approaches commonly used in the literature to capture investor attention with online searches, such as tickers versus company names, market index attention versus aggregated individual stock attention, or log-differences versus abnormal log-differences of search volumes, are all consistent measures to capture future investor trades. Overall, our findings strongly support the view that online searches are a coherent proxy for the presence of retail investors in the stock market.

使用 2018 年至 2020 年巴西股市散户投资者的每日总交易量，我们发现在线搜索与散户投资者的未来交易表现出很强的关联，并且这种关系在不同的市场条件下都可以观察到。此外，我们还记录了文献中常用的通过在线搜索来吸引投资者注意力的替代方法，例如股票代码与公司名称、市场指数注意力与总体个股注意力，或搜索量的对数差异与异常对数差异, 都是捕捉未来投资者交易的一致措施。总的来说，我们的研究结果强烈支持这样一种观点，即在线搜索是散户投资者在股市中存在的连贯代理。