Solomon Asch's conformity experiments showed that people are inclined to conform their opinions to those of the group, even when the group's opinion conflicts with objective evidence. This tendency towards herding behavior has also been observed in individual investors. Studies of retail brokerage data found evidence that buying and selling decisions of individual investors are highly correlated and influenced by past stock returns, even when not driven by institutional investors, taxes, or risk preferences. The herding causes investors to concentrate their buying in fewer stocks than their selling and to be net buyers of stocks with unusually high trading volume. As a result, individual investors have the potential to systematically affect asset prices through their correlated behavior.