We study the effect of investor inertia on stock price fluctuations with a market microstructure
model comprising many small investors who are inactive most of the time.
It turns out that semi-Markov processes are tailor made for modelling inert investors.
With a suitable scaling, we show that when the price is driven by the market imbalance,
the log price process is approximated by a process with long range dependence
and non-Gaussian returns distributions, driven by a fractional Brownian motion. Consequently,
investor inertia may lead to arbitrage opportunities for sophisticated market
participants. The mathematical contributions are a functional central limit theorem for
stationary semi-Markov processes, and approximation results for stochastic integrals
of continuous semimartingales with respect to fractional Brownian motion.