Which market has leading informational advantage: stocks or options? Using large set of stock and option characteristics, and machine learning, we provide a comprehensive analysis of which characteristics are the first order importance predictors of options and stock returns. First, we find that...

We estimate investor disagreement from synthetic long and short stock trades in the equity options market. We show that high disagreement predicts low stock returns after positive earnings surprises and high stock returns after negative earnings surprises. The negative effect is stronger for...

Portfolio optimization focuses on risk and return prediction, yet implementation costs critically matter. Predicting trading costs is challenging because costs depend on trade size and trader identity, thus impeding a generic solution. We focus on a component of trading costs that applies...

We introduce a new measure of active portfolio management, Active Share, which represents the share of portfolio holdings that differ from the benchmark index holdings. We compute Active Share for domestic equity mutual funds from 1980 to 2003. We relate Active Share to fund characteristics such...

We use a novel sample of separate accounts to perform an out-of-sample test of the predictive power of active share (Cremers and Petajisto, 2009). While active share has limited predictive power unconditionally, it has significant power conditional on past performance. We find strong positive...