THE EFFECT OF U.S. TRADE DEFICIT ANNOUNCEMENTS ON THE STOCK PRICES OF U.S. AND JAPANESE AUTOMAKERS

The existing literature on the trade news effect on asset prices generally looks at exchange rates and stock market indexes. We focus on individual stocks: the U.S. and Japanese “Big Three” automobile stocks. We examine Japanese automobile American Depositary Receipts (ADRs), not the stocks per se, to avoid the time lag problem. First, we find deficit news shocks, especially the positive shocks, have a negative effect on the Japanese automobile ADRs. Second, we find only weak evidence that the news effect is different under different economic conditions. Third, trade news is found to be a competitive shock to the automakers in the sense of Karolyi and Stulz (1996) . Last, statistically generated U.S.–Japan bilateral trade deficit news and bilateral auto trade deficit news have no effect on the automobile stock in general.     

中美贸易摩擦对国际贸易板块的冲击--基于事件研究法

中美建交40周年以来,中美经贸关系既有合作又有摩擦。自2018年3月美国向中国部分商品加征关税,中美贸易战正式打响,中美贸易摩擦持续升级,导致国际贸易板块剧烈波动,引发投资者恐慌情绪。本文基于事件研究法,分析"正面"和"负面"中美贸易摩擦新闻事件分别对国际贸易板块的影响,首先通过对"窗口期"平均异常收益率进行分析,为投资者分别提供在中美贸易新闻"正面""负面"事件冲击下利用股市"T+1"交易机制对国际贸易板块进行投资时获利的最佳投资点;其次通过对"窗口期"累计异常收益率的分析,为投资者分别提供在中美贸易"正面""负面"两种新闻事件冲击下对国际贸易板块进行投资的最佳区间,最大化其超额收益。为投资者在中美贸易摩擦时期对国际贸易板块进行投资时,合理的规避风险、最大化其超额收益,同时提升投资者在负面新闻事件发出时的情绪,减少国际贸易公司市值的进一步缩水。     

Impact of macro-economic surprises on carry trade activity

Can official news and policy announcements affect foreign exchange speculation? A widespread speculative strategy in foreign exchange markets is carry trade. This paper explores the links between macro-economic news and foreign exchange options to identify macro-economic fundamentals most relevant to the pricing of downside risk – measured by risk reversals options contracts – to carry trade activity. Focusing primarily on the Japanese yen carry trade, we identify a significant impact of macro-economic surprises on dollar/yen risk reversals. The effect is sizeable, with news related to bilateral trade balance of particular concern. Moreover, there is a close link between risk reversals and speculative futures positions in Japanese yen. This allows us to quantify a substantial effect of macro-economic news on carry trade activity, with the cost of hedging as the transmission mechanism.     

Transmission of the U.S. subprime crisis to emerging markets: Evidence on the decoupling–recoupling hypothesis

We find that emerging markets appeared to be somewhat insulated from developments in U.S. financial markets from early 2007 to summer 2008. From that point on, however, emerging markets responded very strongly to the deteriorating situation in the U.S. financial system and real economy. Our regression “event study,” focusing on 15 types of news, indicates that a range of financial and real economic news emanating from the US had statistically and economically large impacts on 14 emerging markets and several news events uniformly moved markets. Policy measures taken in emerging markets to insulate themselves from global financial developments proved inadequate in the face of the credit crunch and decline in international trade that followed the Lehman bankruptcy in September 2008.     

Asymmetric news responses of high‐frequency and non‐high‐frequency traders

Using NASDAQ trade and Reuters news data, I show that the response of aggressive non‐high‐frequency traders (nHFTs) to news is stronger than that of aggressive high‐frequency traders (HFTs). Classifying news into quantitative (“hard”) and less quantitative (“softer”) news, the trading response of aggressive nHFTs to softer news exceeds HFTs’ response. Positive news elicits greater return and nHFT responses than negative news during the 2008 financial crisis period. As this phenomenon persists even after excluding the 2008 short‐sale ban, the results support the hypothesis of nHFTs exhibiting stronger asymmetric responses during crisis periods.     

Are active fund managers collectors of private information or fast interpreters of public information?

Recent studies of fund manager performance find evidence of outperformance. However limited research exists as to whether such outperformance is because of privately collected information, or merely expedient interpretation of publicly released information. In this study, we examine the trade sequences of active Australian equity fund managers around earnings announcements to provide insights into the source of fund managers’ superior information. We document an increased occurrence of buy‐sell trade sequences around good‐news earnings announcements. The evidence is consistent with fund managers having both private information about forthcoming good‐news earnings announcements and being ‘short‐term profiteers’. We find no evidence that fund managers have private information about forthcoming bad‐news earnings announcements. However, we do find an increase in the frequency of fund managers not trading before bad‐news earnings announcements only to subsequently sell during announcements.     

The impact of public information on investors

This study investigates the trading behavior of institutional and individual investors around both firm-specific news releases in the Wall Street Journal and macro-economic announcements. For the firm-specific news releases we find that investors conduct a high degree of trading around news releases, especially earnings and dividend news. Institutions buy and sell on both good and bad news, while individual investors only trade on good news. The length of the news article (visibility) is also an important attribute to motivate individual investor trading. Lastly, both institutions and individuals buy large firms after good economic news and sell large firms after bad economic news. The trading of small firms does not appear to be motivated by macro-news.     

Strategic insider trading around earnings announcements in Australia

This paper tests, within the Australian setting, whether directors strategically time trades in their own firms, around earnings announcements, in the context of impediments to trading in the immediately preceding period. I show that both signed and unsigned trade activity are insignificantly different from zero in the preceding period, and significantly negative and positive after the event. Further, directors in Australia significantly sell following positive earnings news, and buy after negative news, providing evidence of ‘indirect’ trading. Directors’ trades in the longer-term pre-announcement period are also negatively related to the news content sentiment, contrary to expectation. Finally, I find evidence of positive autocorrelation between directors’ trades over the longer-term past, and those executed after earnings announcements, which, in the absence of the ‘short-swing’ rule in Australia, casts doubt over short-term strategic insider trading, more generally.     

Earnings Announcements: Good News for Institutional Investors and Short Sellers

In this paper, we consider the trading behavior of institutional investors and short sellers around earnings announcements. The results suggest that institutional investors, and to a lesser extent short sellers, successfully anticipate earnings news. In the period immediately after the earnings announcement, both types of traders are active in the market and trade in response to the earnings announcement. In particular, short sellers are quick to increase their short positions when a company releases bad news. Institutional traders also trade in response to the news; however, they take longer to react.     

Fractals in trade duration: capturing long-range dependence and heavy tailedness in modeling trade duration

Several studies that have investigated a few stocks have found that the spacing between consecutive financial transactions (referred to as trade duration) tend to exhibit long-range dependence, heavy tailedness, and clustering. In this study, we empirically investigate whether a larger sample of stocks exhibit those characteristics. We do so by comparing goodness of fit in modeling trade duration data for stable distribution and fractional stable noise based on a procedure applying bootstrap methods developed by the authors with several alternative distributional assumptions in modeling trade duration data. The empirical results suggest that the autoregressive conditional duration model with stable distribution fits better than other combinations, while fractional stable noise itself fits better for the time series of trade duration. Our result is consistent with the general findings in the literature that trade duration is informative and that short trade durations move prices more than long trade duration. In addition, our result confirms the advantage of fractal models in the study of roughness in trade duration and provides some evidence for duration dependence. S. Rachev’s research was supported by grants from the Division of Mathematical, Life and Physical Science, College of Letters and Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. W. Sun’s research was supported by grants from the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. P.S. Kalev’s research was supported with a NCG grant from the Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University. Data are supplied by Securities Industry Research Center of Asia-Pacific (SIRCA) on behalf of Reuters. The first draft of this paper was presented at the International Conference on High Frequency Finance 2006; the authors would like to thank the conference participants for their valuable comments.     

Housing market dynamics in a small open economy: Do external and news shocks matter?

We study the sources of fluctuations in the housing market of a small open economy. We use an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model and data from seven small open economies to assess the quantitative effects of both contemporaneous and news shocks to domestic and external fundamentals on housing market dynamics. External shocks and news shocks have significant effects. Cyclical fluctuations in housing prices and housing investment are mainly driven by contemporaneous shocks related to foreign housing preferences and terms of trade, and by news shocks related to domestic consumption-goods technology, housing preferences and terms of trade. The spillover effects of external shocks on housing prices are notably larger than those of domestic shocks.     

Informed trading before positive vs. negative earnings surprises

This paper investigates whether institutional investors trade profitably around the announcements of positive or negative earnings surprises. Using Korean data over the period of 2001–2010, we find that information asymmetry is larger before negative earnings surprises (earnings shock) among investors and that the trading volume decreases only before earnings shock announcements due to the severe information asymmetry. We also find that institutions sell their stocks prior to earnings shock announcements whereas individual and foreign investors do not anticipate bad news. Finally, we find that institutional trade imbalance is positively related to the post-announcement abnormal returns of negative events. This study complements and extends prior literature on informed trading around earnings announcements by documenting evidence that domestic institutions exploit their superior information around particularly earnings shock announcements.     

Market Sidedness: Insights into Motives for Trade Initiation

We infer motives for trade initiation from market sidedness. We define trading as more two-sided (one-sided) if the correlation between the number of buyer- and seller-initiated trades increases (decreases), and assess changes in sidedness (relative to a control sample) around events that identify trade initiators. Consistent with asymmetric information, trading is more one-sided before merger news. Consistent with belief heterogeneity, trading is more two-sided before earnings and macro announcements with greater dispersion in analyst forecasts, and after news with larger announcement surprises. We examine the codeterminacy of sidedness, bid-ask spread, volatility, number of trades, and order imbalance.     

On the inadequacy of newswire reports for empirical research on foreign exchange interventions

Reuters news reports have become an accepted tool for empirical studies analyzing informational asymmetries in FX markets. This paper tests the accuracy of the Reuters reports for Swiss interventions in the foreign exchange market. The evidence finds that the time stamp of the Reuters reports does not always lie near the recorded time of the first intervention trade as is commonly assumed in market microstructure studies. The standard deviation of the time difference is measured in hours and not in minutes. These and other regression results question the accuracy of Reuters reports for Swiss interventions.     

Analyst Impartiality and Investment Banking Relationships

This study examines whether investment banking ties influence the speed with which analysts convey unfavorable news. We hypothesize that affiliated analysts have incentives to respond promptly to good news but prefer not to issue bad news about client companies. Using duration models of the time between an equity issue and the first downgrade, we find affiliated analysts are slower to downgrade from Buy and Hold recommendations and significantly faster to upgrade from Hold recommendations, in both within‐analyst and within‐issuer tests. We also find affiliated analysts issue recommendations sooner and more frequently after an offering than unaffiliated analysts, and that unaffiliated analysts are more likely than affiliated analysts to drop coverage of sample firms. Our findings indicate that banking ties increase analysts' reluctance to reveal negative news, and that reform efforts must carefully consider the incentives of affiliated and unaffiliated analysts to initiate coverage and convey the results of their research.     

Asset Prices,News Shocks,and the Trade Balance

We analyze the relationship between asset prices and the trade balance estimating a Bayesian VAR for a broad set of 38 industrialized and emerging market countries. To derive model‐based identifying restrictions, we model asset price shocks as news shocks about future productivity in a two‐country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. Such shocks are found to exert sizable effects on the trade balance. Moreover, the effects are highly heterogeneous across countries. For instance, following a news shock that implies on impact a 10% increase in domestic equity prices relative to the rest of the world, the U.S. trade balance will worsen by up to 1.0 percentage points, but much less so for most other economies. We find that this heterogeneity appears to be linked to the financial market depth and equity home bias of countries. Moreover, the channels via wealth effects and via the real exchange rate are important for understanding the heterogeneity in the transmission.     

Insider Trading in Financial Signaling Models

We study the impact of voluntary trade by the manager. We find that, in contrast to standard signaling models, an action is good news for some firms and bad news for others, depending on observable characteristics of the firm, its managers, and their compensation plans. Further, voluntary trade eliminates separating equilibria and thus the possibility of exactly inferring the manager's private information. This may cause the manager to take inefficient actions so as to earn trading profits. Such undesirable behavior can be more effectively constrained by compensation contracts based on phantom shares or nontradeable options instead of large stockholdings.     

INDIVIDUAL,INSTITUTIONAL, AND SPECIALIST TRADE PATTERNS BEFORE AND AFTER DISCLOSURE

We examine the trade response of individuals, institutional traders, and specialists to disclosures. We investigate reactions to good versus bad news and mandatory versus discretionary announcements. We find that individuals and institutions both have heightened trade activity before disclosures. Institutional trade runs counter to the price reaction to upcoming discretionary disclosures. Institutions' post‐announcement trade is consistent with the direction of the price reaction to the announcement, whereas individuals' post‐announcement trade runs counter to the price reaction. Although specialists face increased trade pressure both before and after announcements, strong directional imbalances in specialist trade are not observed. JEL classification: G14     

INSIDER TRADING: THE CASE AGAINST THE "VICTIMLESS CRIME" HYPOTHESIS

This paper challenges the long held hypothesis that insider trading is a victimless crime. Using utility maximization analysis, the author examines both the good news and bad news cases. Injury is demonstrated. Separability of the insider's trade from the insider's information monopoly is also examined utilizing the generally accepted market structure analysis. Separability is rejected.     

Are corporate managers savvy about their stock price? Evidence from insider trading after earnings announcements

We find that insiders trade as if they exploit market underreaction to earnings news, buying (selling) after good (bad) earnings announcements when the price reaction to the announcement is low (high). We also find that insider trades attributable to public information about earnings and the price reaction generate abnormal returns. By demonstrating that managers spot market underreaction to earnings news, our results imply that managers are savvy about their company’s stock price.