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Abstract Investor sentiment is a central pillar of behavioral finance, which justifies anomalies to the asset’s intrinsic value. This paper investigates the sentiment effect on various portfolio returns, considering the difference between sentiment-pone portfolios. Moreover, it investigates the sentiment effect on firms’ commitment to adopt conservatism; utilizing Egyptian listed firm as being an emerging market (i.e. 136 firms, corresponding to 5848 firm-quarter observations). The quadratic-predictive analyses are used to reflect the dynamic association between sentiment and portfolio return sorted upon size, value, dividend payout, tangibility, leverage, total risk, profitability, and firm age. The findings suggest persistence of stock bubbles with ultimate corrections in most portfolios (size, tangibility, and leverage); analogous to long line of research. The results remain intact to the inclusion of size and value factors of Fama and French (1993), and momentum factor of Carhart (1997) model; to discern the effect of various risk factors in the underlying analysis. Hence, the results support the notion that sentiment is not a purely contrarian indicator to stock return; asserting the sentiment seesaw phenomenon. Moreover, when considering the sentiment-conservatism association, the findings reveal that firms engage in less conservative financial reporting during high sentiment period; in a way to reap more profit during prevailing optimistic period while lessen the harshly circumstances during the pessimistic period, as well. Our inferences remain intact to the inclusion of alternative measures of accounting conservatism as a robustness check, in addition to other classification methods. One concern when splitting whole sample into speculative stocks and their counterparts, the results are inconclusive; suggesting that value stocks are not likely sentimentimmune; analogous to line of literature. Hence, the findings embrace the notion that investor sentiment is contagious in the stock market. The results yield important implications for standard setters and regulators who disregard role of accounting conservatism in stock market; especially so given, in an emerging economy whose culture akin to herd-like behavior |