Momentum traders buy stock (often on margin) as prices rise and sell as prices fall. In essence, they are trying to obtain the benefits of a call option — upside participation with limited risk on the downside — without any payment of an option premium. The strategy appears to offer a chance...

This paper investigates a variety of features exhibited by the amplitude of stock returns. Some of these "stylized facts" have already attracted a great deal of attention from researchers, while some others have been documented only recently. - Horizontal dependence of volatility: Volatility is...

Some of the world's largest futures exchanges impose daily limits on the price movements of individual contracts. Using data from three of the most active US commodity futures contracts, we show that these price restrictions are largely ineffective because traders are able to take similar...

This paper investigates the reaction of credit default swaps spreads to changes in rating class, outlook, and watchlist entries for sovereigns. We find a stronger response to negative outlook and watchlist changes than for actual rating class downgrades, which shows that negative outlook and...

Volatility trading is in vogue. Launched in January 2009, exchange-traded products (ETPs) linked to the CBOE Market Volatility Index (VIX) have enamored no small number of traders judging by the billions of dollars invested in these new products. Why exactly is unclear. The most popular VIX ETPs...

The large inflow of investment capital to commodity futures markets in the last decade has generated a heated debate about whether financialization distorts commodity prices. Rather than focusing on the opposing views concerning whether investment flows either did or did not cause a price...

The ISDA CDS standard model assumes a single flat hazard rate (default intensity) rather than a term structure of hazard rates. This assumption introduces biases into CDS spreads for empirical research after the CDS Big Bang. This paper is the first to document the biases and provide a simple...

We discuss the idea of a purely algorithmic universal world iCurrency set forth in: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=2542541" https://ssrn.com/abstract=2542541 and expanded in: "https://ssrn.com/abstract=3059330" https://ssrn.com/abstract=3059330 in light of recent developments, including Libra. Is...

Dynamics of credit markets impact almost all participants in financial markets. Yet, despite rapidly growing international credit markets, we know little about the dynamics of global credit markets, as most studies focus on the US. Here, I propose a new distance-to-default model, empirically...

Typical covered call strategies may be decomposed, using a risk and performance attribution methodology, into three components: equity exposure, short volatility exposure, and equity timing. This paper applies that attribution methodology to covered calls on eleven global indexes. We find that,...