Aggregate Margin Debt and the Divergence of Price from Accounting Fundamentals

We examine whether, in the aggregate, margin debt is associated with the divergence of price from accounting fundamentals. We find that investors increase their margin debt following upward price movements away from accounting fundamentals, consistent with these investors being extrapolative in aggregate. We also find evidence that margin debt appears to be linked to temporary overpricing in recent periods, as the aggregate ratio of margin debt to price is reliably associated with negative future returns since at least 1992. Our results are consistent with the theoretical literature that predicts extrapolative traders have a destabilizing effect on market prices, and helps explain why prices diverge from accounting fundamentals.     

Positive Feedback Trading Under Stress: Evidence from the US Treasury Securities Market

Abstract

A vector autoregression (VAR) is estimated on tick-by-tick data for quote-changes and signed trades of 2-year, 5-year and 10-year on-the-run US Treasury notes. Confirming the results found by Hasbrouck and others for the stock market, signed order flow tends to exert a strong effect on prices. More interestingly, however, there is often a strong effect in the opposite direction, particularly at times of volatile trading. Price declines elicit sales and price increases elicit purchases. An examination of tick-by-tick trading on an especially volatile day confirms this finding. At least in the US Treasury market, trades and price movements appear likely to exhibit positive feedback at short horizons, particularly during periods of market stress. This suggests that the standard analytical approach to the microstructure of financial markets, which focuses on the ways in which the information possessed by informed traders becomes incorporated into market prices through order flow, should be complemented by an account of how price changes affect trading decisions.     

Bubbles and experience: An experiment with a steady inflow of new traders

We revisit the effect of traders' experience on price bubbles by introducing either one‐third or two‐thirds steady inflow of new traders in each of four consecutive experimental asset markets. We find that bubbles are still reduced in the treatments with a steady inflow of new traders, but at a slower pace compared to the baseline treatment in which new traders are only introduced in the last market. Our analysis of individual trading behavior shows that the slower abatement of bubbles in the inflow treatments can be attributed mainly to the inexperienced traders who make more mistakes than experienced traders.     

Trade-size clustering and price efficiency

Using a sample of 26 markets, this paper investigates if trade-size clustering affects price efficiency. Our results suggest that more clustering trades are associated with greater resemblance of a random walk, less pricing errors, and shorter price delays. Moreover, we examine three underlying mechanisms to explain how clustering improves efficiency. First, we show that clustering trades are informative, consistent with the idea that stealth traders leverage such tactics to convey private information to prices. Second, we discover that clustering trades are positively related to investor attention (stock liquidity), implying that informed clustering trades happen at the presence of enormous uninformed investors. High attention and liquid markets help reduce the trading friction, thereby prompting quick price adjustments to private information released by the stealth trading.     

Option Trading,Price Discovery,and Earnings News Dissemination*

Abstract. Option market activity increases by more than 10 percent in the four days before quarterly earnings announcements. We show that the direction of this preannouncement trading foreshadows subsequent earnings news. Specifically, we find option traders initiate a greater proportion of long (short) positions immediately before “good” (“bad”) earnings news. Midquote returns to active-side option trades are positive during nonannouncement periods and are significantly higher immediately prior to earnings announcements. Bid-ask spreads for options widen during the announcement period, but traders do not gravitate toward high delta contracts. Collectively, the evidence shows option traders participate generally in price discovery (the incorporation of private information in price), and more specifically in the dissemination of earnings news.     

Trader Participation in Disclosure: Implications of Interactions with Management

Technological advances are creating a shift in the information disclosure environment allowing more investors to interact with management. We examine three key levels of trader-management interaction to assess the accuracy of traders' market-tested value estimates and resulting market price. These data require an engaging experiment and a complex, contextually rich asset, which we create by playing a popular gaming app before the experiment. Participants view financial information, ask management questions, estimate value, and trade. We find that receiving non-personalized question responses improves trader estimates of value and market price efficiency relative to when traders ask questions but do not expect a response. This occurs because traders exert more effort estimating value and trading. However, receiving personalized versus non-personalized responses harms value estimates and market efficiency. This occurs because traders receiving personalized responses fixate on the interaction with management, dividing their attention and diverting it away from valuing and trading the asset.     

Discussion of “Aggregate Margin Debt and the Divergence of Price from Accounting Fundamentals”

Burger and Curtis (2017) is an empirical investigation of whether aggregate margin debt correlates with aggregate stock prices and aggregate accounting‐based fundamentals. While the paper convincingly documents a significant relation: aggregate margin debt is higher when aggregate fundamentals‐to‐price ratios are low, it fails to document why. The documented relation could exist because margin traders are the overly exuberant noise traders that push stock prices higher away from fundamental values; or the documented relation could be spurious, and exist because aggregate margin debt rises with aggregate price levels simply because margin loan capacity increases as aggregate price levels increase. With insufficiently granular data (aggregate margin debt measured monthly), the authors are not able to sort out why the relation exists. Thus, interpretation of the findings documented in this paper is difficult.     

Trade Liberalization and National Food Security: Rice Trade between Bangladesh and India

Following a poor harvest in late 1997 and a massive flood in 1998, private sector traders in Bangladesh imported several million metric tons of rice from India. This paper presents evidence that this trade, made possible by separate trade liberalizations in India and Bangladesh in the early 1990s, augmented domestic supplies and stabilized prices in Bangladesh at import parity levels. Letters of credit data indicating the participation of hundreds of importers, and a close correlation of price movements across the two countries suggest that the trade was competitive. A risk of co-incident crop shortfalls in the two countries remains, though these have occurred rarely in the past two decades. Bangladesh imports from alternative sources would also enhance food availability if another production shortfall occurs, but these imports face higher transport costs and would involve far fewer importing firms given the economies of scale of shipments by sea.The positive contribution of trade liberalization to short-run food security in Bangladesh in recent years does not minimize the importance of increased agricultural productivity and rural economic growth to provide rural poor households with sufficient incomes to acquire food. Nonetheless, the Bangladesh experience shows that trade liberalization offers potential benefits for national food security by enabling a rapid increase of food supplies following domestic production shortfalls.     

Earnings Forecasts and Price Efficiency after Earnings Realizations: Reduction in Information Asymmetry through Learning from Price*

When information asymmetry is a major market friction, earnings forecasts can lead to higher price efficiency even after the information in forecasts completely dissipates upon earnings realizations. We show this in an experimental market that features information asymmetry (i.e., some traders possess differential private information). Earnings forecasts reduce information asymmetry and lead to prices that reflect a greater amount of private information. Traders can learn more about others' information from prices. This information learned from past prices continues to reduce information asymmetry and improve price efficiency even after earnings realizations. We contribute to the disclosure literature by showing the evidence that the learning‐from‐price effect amplifies the impact of public disclosure on price efficiency.     

Volatility transmission for cross-listed firms and the role of international exposure

We find empirical evidence suggesting that the volatility dynamics of Japanese firms cross-listed in the US is characterized as a Meteor Shower with Country-Specific News. Furthermore, we find differences in volatility dynamics depending on the international exposure of firms. These differences are consistent with a higher contribution of foreign traders (foreign markets) to the price discovery process of Japanese firms with higher international exposure, and with a news-correlated process for these firms. We also find weaker empirical evidence suggesting a higher contribution of Japanese traders to the price discovery process of Japanese firms with lower international exposure.     

Black markets: Illegality, information, and rents

The analysis of black markets typically treats illegality only in reduced form as an additional cost per transaction. We argue that this misses the essential feature of black markets: that the risk of detection depends upon the dissemination of information. Because the cost of information is increased, traders will change marketing technology from advertising to sequential approaches to potential customers. The trader's decision problem is his offer price: as he raises it he must expect to make more approaches per sale and thereby increase detection risk. This behavior is important because of its implications at the market level. The optimal offer price will be set at a level at which excess demand persists: would-be consumers are not always able to bid themselves into supplies. Hence, black markets are not sufficient to eliminate the shortages which arise from price controls. In an earlier paper the authors established that peasant supply response to crop prices would be perverse in the presence of shortages: black markets therefore need not restore normal responses. The paper includes evidence from rural Tanzania.     

FOOD INFLATION IN SOUTH AFRICA: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR ECONOMIC POLICY

This paper analyses the trends in food price movements in South Africa between 1980 and 2008. There are three main results emanating from the analysis in this paper. Firstly, food price movements have played a large role in generating inflationary episodes in South Africa. Secondly, while external influences do matter, South African food price movements are mainly due to domestic influences. This implies that national policy has an important role to play in taming domestic food price inflation. Thirdly, given the strong second round impacts, food price movements warrant special attention in monetary policymaking. Core measures of inflation that exclude food price movements may not accurately reflect the underlying inflationary pressures in the economy and could compromise the attainment of the goal of price stability.     

Can price limits help when the price is falling? Evidence from transactions data on the Shanghai Stock Exchange

We use transactions data to explore the magnet effects of price limit rules on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE). When limit hits are imminent, stock prices are found to approach the price limits at faster rates, with higher trading intensity and larger price variation, supporting the magnet effect hypothesis of Subrahmanyam [Subrahmanyam, A., 1994. Circuit breakers and market volatility: A theoretical perspective. Journal of Finance, 49, 237–254.]. Moreover, when stock prices approach the floor limits, we observe lower than normal market conditions’ trading volume and trade size but a wider spread. The panic selling psychology of individual investors for fear of illiquidity and the strategic trading decisions of discretionary traders during periods prior to price limit hits at the floors are conjectured as possible explanations for the observed price behaviors. Post-limit-hit analysis reveals evidence of delayed price discovery at the ceiling limit but price reversal at the floor.     

证券市场信息反馈理论浅析

本文借助Glosten/Milgrom(1985)的信息模型来分析在证券市场存在非对称信息的情况下,做市商为避免在和知情交易者进行交易时由于信息的不完整性时产生损失,而确立一个股票买卖价格的差额。做市商通过观察交易者的交易委托类型,借助贝叶斯定理来学习信息的反馈,而股票的真正价值会随着交易过程的延续最终体现在股票的价格中。该模型的研究为我国做市商制度的发展和完善提供了必要的理论依据。     

Margin,Short Selling,and Lotteries in Experimental Asset Markets

The robustness of bubbles and crashes in markets for assets with finite lives is perplexing. This paper reports the results of experimental asset markets in which participants trade two assets. In some markets, price bubbles form. In these markets, traders pay higher prices for the asset with lottery characteristics (i.e., a claim on a large, unlikely payoff). However, institutional design has a significant impact on deviations in prices from fundamental values, particularly for an asset with lottery characteristics. Price run-ups and crashes are moderated when traders finance purchases of the assets themselves and are allowed to short sell.     

包含多个知情交易者的可甄别交易流模型研究

本文扩展Corb（1994）分析框架，研究包含多个知情交易者的可甄别交易流模型．通过数值解的方法求得理性预期均衡。研究表明，线性理性预期均衡与相应的卡尔类型模型的均衡是相同的。在非线性理性预期均衡中，与卡尔类型模型相比，知情交易者的期望利润更低．市场流动性更高；当市场上不知情交易者的数量较少以及知情交易者的私人信息准确度不高时．知情交易者的交易强度更大，价格更有效，反之，知情交易者的交易强度会更小。     

What moved share prices in the nineteenth‐century London stock market?†

Using a new weekly blue‐chip index, this article investigates the causes of stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870. We find that economic fundamentals explain about 15 per cent of weekly and 34 per cent of monthly variation in share prices. Contemporary press reporting from the London Stock Exchange is used to ascertain what market participants thought was causing the largest movements on the market. The vast majority of large movements were attributed by the press to geopolitical, monetary, railway‐sector, and financial‐crisis news. Investigating the stock price changes on an independent list of events reaffirms these findings, suggesting that the most important specific events that moved markets were wars involving European powers.     

What Drives Stock Prices? Identifying the Determinants of Stock Price Movements

In this paper, we show that the data have difficulty distinguishing a stock price decomposition in which expectations of future real dividend growth is a primary determinant of stock price movements from one in which expectations of future excess returns are a primary determinant. The data cannot distinguish between these very different decompositions because movements in the price-dividend ratio are very persistent whereas neither real dividend growth nor excess returns are; most of the information about low-frequency movements in dividend growth and excess returns is contained in stock prices and not the series themselves. We further show that this inability to identify the source of stock price movements is not solely due to poor power and size properties of our statistical procedure, nor does it appear to be due to the presence of a rational bubble.     

Commodity prices and the macroeconomy: An extended dependent economy approach

This paper proposes a straightforward model for analysing the impact of export commodity price fluctuations on open macroeconomies with particular reference to Australia and New Zealand, major commodity exporters in the Asian region. It extends the dependent economy approach, first by re-specifying goods and services production as either exportable, importable or non-tradable, and second by adding a monetary sector to highlight key linkages between commodity prices, the exchange rate, price level, national output and trade account. The framework sheds new light on the phenomenon of ‘commodity currencies’, how exchange rate movements shield national output from terms of trade shocks, the importance of economic openness in this process, and the significance for monetary and exchange rate policy of short term, versus sustained, commodity price movements.     

Discretionary Disclosures to Risk‐Averse Traders: A Research Note

Verrecchia (1983) investigates a manager's incentives for costly, discretionary disclosure of his information to risk‐averse traders when the functional form of prices is exogenously specified. We extend Verrecchia (1983) by deriving the endogenously determined functional form of prices that would arise when all traders have constant risk tolerance. We show that these endogenously determined prices are inconsistent with the assumed prices in Verrecchia (1983) when the manager elects to not disclose. We derive the manager's disclosure strategy for our setting and extend the comparative static results in Verrecchia (1990) for risk‐neutral traders to a setting where traders have constant risk tolerance and prices are endogenously derived. Further, in our setting, discretionary disclosure does not affect how traders price risk of different outcomes. Also, we offer a representation of risk‐averse traders' prices using risk‐adjusted distributions. Finally, these results provide implications for empirical‐archival discretionary disclosure studies.