An option contract is a zero-sum game, so two identical risk-averse investors would never take opposite sides of it. While they will agree on the correct option price, they would never trade with each other. Heterogeneity is essential for options trading to exist, and aggregating diverse...

This study tests whether investor belief differences affect the cross-sectional variation of risk-neutral skewness, using data on firm-level stock options traded on the CBOE from 2003 to 2006. Using well known proxies for heterogeneous beliefs, we find that stocks with greater belief differences...

We discover three significant periodicities in the autocorrelation of intraday stock returns. We demonstrate that (i) the autocorrelation is 64% more negative during afternoons than during mornings, (ii) the autocorrelation is more negative Tuesdays through Fridays than on Mondays, (iii) overall...