Underlying each stock trades hundreds of options at different strike prices and maturities. The order flow from these option transactions reveals important information about the underlying stock price movement and its volatility variation. How to aggregate the trade information of different...

Option prices vary with not only the underlying asset price, but also volatilities and higher moments. In this paper, we use a portfolio of options to seclude the value change of the portfolio from the impact of volatility and higher moments. We apply this portfolio approach to the price...

Electronic trading markets have evolved rapidly with continued adoption of new technologies and growing information acquisition and processing capabilities. Traditional perspectives on trading performance adopted a monolithic view of information. Past research and practitioner heuristics posit...

This article examines trading behavior in the options market conditioned on mispricing in the underlying stock. We investigate the price equilibrium between the observed equity asset and the options-implied synthetic share as well as the relative divergence between the two prices. We find a...

Motivated by the nature of asset pricing models, we investigate the cross-sectional relation between the market's ex-ante view of a stock's risk and the stock's ex-ante expected return. We demonstrate that an ex-ante measure of expected returns based on analyst price targets is highly related to...

This paper investigates the market microstructure effects on client firms of equity holdings by relationship banks, i.e., lenders and/or underwriters, prior to the 2008 financial crisis. It intends to shed light on the need for “the Volcker Rule.” We find that banks' equity holdings of...

We develop an ex-ante measure of expected stock returns based on analyst price targets. We then show that ex-ante measures of volatility, skewness, and kurtosis implied from stock option prices are positively related to the cross section of ex-ante expected stock returns. While expected returns...

Prior evidence on pre-bankruptcy filing informed trading is mixed. The inconclusive findings might result from the sole focus on stock trading. We reassess the presence of pre-filing informed and insider trades by examining the information content of options trading before bankruptcy...

Information production associated with derivatives markets is not a sideshow: It has significant positive spillover effects on an array of corporate decisions of underlying firms. Using exogenous variations in option availability as an instrument for a change in information environment, we show...