Futures market officials are confronted with the difficult task of setting appropriate margin levels that must balance the costs of trader default and the benefits of increased market liquidity. One way to guard against default is prudent margin setting practices designed to protect futures...

This paper reports some tests of Scandinavian stock market indices. Firstly, Granger causality tests of daily Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Finnish stock returns are performed. Secondly, the effects of world-wide returns on these four Scandinavian markets are analysed. Some causality between...

This paper investigates the hypothesis of sequential information arrival in the Finnish stock index futures and options markets. With no short selling restrictions in the derivatives markets, no causality relationships between returns and trading volume are observed. However, by using the...

This paper documents a stark periodicity in intraday volume and in the number of trades. We find activity in both variables spikes by about 20% at regular intervals of 5 or 10min throughout the trading day. We speculate this activity is either the result of algorithmic trading influenced by...

We investigate the practical issues of implementing the self-financing pairs portfolio trading strategy presented by Gatev et al. (2006). We also provide new evidence on the profitability of pairs trading under different weighting structures and trade initiation conditions. Using data from the...