Investors and analysts classify firms to conduct valuations or to evaluate performance. The industry groupings usually rely on SIC, NAIC, GICS, or Fama-French classifications. Our purpose is to form groups of companies based on the structure of their financial statements. Using cluster analysis,...

Turmoil and uncertainty confront firms when they are named as defendants in class action lawsuits. In this article, we consider whether option markets interpret the implications of these dramatic corporate events for mid-to-long term performance. In particular, we consider relatively simple,...

We consider which readily observable characteristics of individual stocks (e.g., option implied volatility, accounting data, analyst data) may be used to forecast subsequent extreme price movements. We are the first to explicitly consider the predictive influence of option implied volatility in...

This study explores the time series variability of the Stambaugh et al. (2012) aggregate mispricing score as well as its eleven individual components. We find that the predictive power of the mispricing score for future stock returns improves significantly when the mispricing score has been more...

Prior literature shows that the implied volatility spread between call and put options is a bullish signal for future returns on the underlying stocks. A common interpretation is that a high call-put implied volatility spread indicates favorable private information revealed by informed option...

Informed traders often use options that are not in-the-money due to higher potential gains for a smaller upfront cost. Thus, trading activity by option moneyness should be a gauge of informed option trading. We construct a dollar volume-weighted average moneyness measure to capture option...

Prior literature finds information is reflected in option markets before stock markets using daily and weekly trading volume, but evidence is mixed at the intraday level. Using novel intraday signed option volume data, we develop a composite option trading score (OTS) and document its stock...

Equity option markets exhibit intense trading activity. We use the variability of option implied volatility spread as a proxy for the impounding of new information, and changes in the interpretation of existing information, into option prices. Over the 2006 – 2016 period, we find that the...