We use a data set consisting of a complete history of all transactions and quotes to examine intraday patterns in trading volume, volatility and the quoted bid-ask spread in the market for FTSE-100 index futures. We document a number of regularities in the pattern of daily returns and volatility...

Loretan-Phillips maximal moment exponent estimators are used to investigate the distribution of S&P 500 stock returns at a range of different frequencies. In all cases, the variance is found to be finite, but the existence of higher-order moments is in some doubt.

The well known fact that investment trusts (closed-end mutual funds in the USA) trade at a discount means that the return to an investor depends not only on the change in net asset value (NAV), but also on changes in the discount over the holding period. Using daily data, this paper models the...

This paper presents and tests a model of the volatility of individual companies' stocks, using implied volatilities derived from option prices. The data comes from traded options quoted on the London International Financial Futures Exchange. The model relates equity volatilities to corporate...

The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and...

We show that the behaviour of the real exchange rates of the UK, Germany, France and Japan has been characterized by structural breaks, which changed the adjustment mechanism. In the context of a Time-Varying Smooth Transition Autoregression (TV-STAR) of the kind introduced by Lundbergh et al....