Rate My Professor Olena Onishchenko

Dr Olena Onishchenko is a Senior Lecturer in Finance in the Department of Accountancy and Finance within the Otago Business School at the University of Otago. She earned her BA, MS, and PhD from Poltava National Technical University in Ukraine. Since joining the department in 2014, she has developed a strong research profile in empirical capital markets research. Her academic interests encompass investors' trading behavior—both retail and institutional—short selling, securities lending, market microstructure, and the application of machine learning in finance. Onishchenko has forged significant research collaborations, including partnerships with the New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) and S3 Partners, a New York-based financial analytics firm. She has secured funding through multiple grants from the Accounting & Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand (AFAANZ) and internal University of Otago research grants, such as the 2021 AFAANZ grant for "Equity lending and stock resiliency surrounding market crashes" and the 2019 Commerce Research Grant for "Who trades on intraday equity market momentum?".

Onishchenko's scholarly contributions appear in prestigious journals including the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Journal of Behavioral & Experimental Finance, Journal of Behavioral Finance, and The European Journal of Finance. Notable publications include "Do short sellers amplify extreme market declines?" (Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 2024, with Fernando and Kuruppuarachchi), "Investor heterogeneity and anchoring-induced momentum" (Journal of Behavioral & Experimental Finance, 2024, with Zhao, Kongahawatte, and Kuruppuarachchi), "COVID-19 and investors' trading behavior: Evidence from the New Zealand equity market" (Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 2025, with Wilkinson and Finta), "Shunned stocks and market states" (The European Journal of Finance, 2022, with Han and Li), and "Intraday time-series momentum and investor trading behavior" (2021, with Zhao, Kuruppuarachchi, and Roberts). She teaches courses such as FINC 202 Investment Analysis and Portfolio Management and FINC 403 Studies in Capital Markets. Onishchenko serves as Faculty Advisor for the Bloomberg Trading Challenge, with her teams achieving top Australasian rankings in 2024 and 2025. She supervises PhD students on topics like short selling, investor trading behaviour, machine learning for financial risk management, and geopolitical risk in stock returns. Her insights have featured in The Conversation, Newsroom, NZ Herald, and university media on investor behavior, cryptocurrency investment, and digital tokenisation.