Reprint of: Stock salience and the asymmetric market effect of consumer sentiment news

•We examine the announcement of consumer sentiment on US stock and futures markets.•We find that the consumer sentiment announcement has valuable information content.•An asymmetric response is observed for “good” versus “bad” sentiment news.•The effect of negative consumer sentiment announcements is in salient stocks.•The results support the availability heuristic.

We document asymmetric announcement effects of consumer sentiment news on United States stock and stock futures markets. While a negative market effect occurs upon the release of bad sentiment news, there is no market reaction for the counterpart good news. This supports the “negativity effect” hypothesis. Notably, this effect seems most likely to occur in salient stocks, which is consistent with the availability heuristic.