The intraday behaviors and relationships with its underlying assets: evidence on option market in Taiwan

In this paper, we use daily data to investigate the information asymmetric effects and the relationships between the trading volume of options and their underlying spot trading volume. Our results reveal that options with higher liquidity are near-the-money and expiration periods with 2 to 4 weeks have higher trading activity. We classify them into two parts with the ARIMA model: the expected trading activity impact and the unexpected trading activity impact. Using the bivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model, we investigate the trading activity effect and information asymmetric effect. In conclusion, the trading volume volatility of the spot and options markets move together, and a greater expected and unexpected trading volume volatility of the spot (options) market is associated with greater volatility in the options (spot) market. However, both markets generate higher trading volume volatility when people expect such an impact rather than when they do not. We also find that there are feedback effects within these two markets. Furthermore, when the spot (options) market has negative innovations, it generates a greater impact on the options (spot) market than do positive innovations. Finally, the conditional correlation coefficient between the spot and the option markets changes over time based on the bivariate GARCH model.     

Index futures and positive feedback trading: evidence from major stock exchanges

This paper tests the hypothesis that the introduction of index futures has increased positive feedback trading in the spot markets of six industrialized nations. The analysis is based on a model that assumes two different groups of investors, i.e., risk averse expected utility maximizing investors and positive feedback traders. There is evidence consistent with positive feedback trading before the introduction of index futures across all markets under investigation. In the period following the introduction of index futures, there is no evidence supporting the hypothesis that positive feedback trading drives short-term dynamics of stock returns. The possibility that this is due to possible migration of feedback traders from the spot to the futures markets is also tested. The results show no evidence of positive feedback trading in the futures markets. Overall, the findings support the view that futures markets help stabilize the underlying spot markets by reducing the impact of feedback traders and thus attracting more rational investors who make the markets more informationally efficient and thus providing investors with superior ways of managing risk.     

Lessons from the evolution of foreign exchange trading strategies

The adaptive markets hypothesis posits that trading strategies evolve as traders adapt their behavior to changing circumstances. This paper studies the evolution of trading strategies for a hypothetical trader who chooses portfolios from foreign exchange (forex) technical rules in major and emerging markets, the carry trade, and US equities. The results show that a backtesting procedure to choose optimal portfolios improves upon the performance of nonadaptive rules. We also find that forex trading alone dramatically outperforms the S&P 500, with much larger Sharpe ratios over the whole sample, but there is little gain to coordinating forex and equity strategies, which explains why practitioners consider these tools separately. Forex trading returns dip significantly in the 1990s but recover by the end of the decade and have been markedly superior to an equity position since 1998. Overall, trading rule returns still exist in forex markets—with substantial stability in the types of rules—though they have migrated to emerging markets to a considerable degree.     

Stock markets fragmentation,volatility and final investors

The 2000s in equity markets are marked by two major regulatory shocks: RegNMS in the United States, and MiFID in the European Union. Simultaneously, there is a massive increase in the proportion of high-frequency trading, and market orders volume. However, trading volumes do not significantly increase. We propose a theoretical model describing the effects of stock markets fragmentation on two types of investors optimization problems: “intermediary” high-frequency and “final” investors. Volatility has a permanent and a transitory component, whose weights depend on market fragmentation via the share of non-marketable orders of intermediary investors. The trading volume of final investors depends on market fragmentation both directly via transaction costs, and indirectly via total volatility. Finally a shock in fragmentation may lead to a decrease in trading volume, enhanced in the case of an equity markets crisis by a rise in the components of volatility.     

Trading Activity and Financial Market Integration

We investigate the effect of trading activity in the Asian emerging markets on the market integration across Asian emerging and major developed markets over the sample period of 1997 to 2009. The empirical evidence confirms that higher trading activity in Asian emerging markets can induce these markets and developed markets to become more integrated. Furthermore, we identify the mediation effect of market volatility on Asian emerging markets. This effect demonstrates that trading activity in Asian emerging markets not only directly enhances market integration, but also intensifies market volatility, indirectly increasing market integration.     

Does trading volume detect information content in earnings reconciliations of foreign firms?

Currently, foreign firms trading securities on U.S. markets provide periodically a quantitative reconciliation of selected financial data consistent with U.S. GAAP (hereafter referred to as reconciled information) in Form 20-F. The SEC is examining whether users believe that this reconciliation process provides additional information above that provided by the foreign GAAP earning announcement and whether this incremental information enhances usefulness for market participants. We examine whether the reconciliation affects a primary indicator of information usefulness: the trading volume of capital markets participants.We use a regression model to examine the relation between a measure of abnormal trading volume and four firm-specific variables in the firm's information environment: similarities of accounting systems, analyst following, difference between reconciled earnings and foreign GAAP earnings, and dispersion of analysts’ expectations. We find a significant relation between abnormal volume and the reconciled earnings number and between abnormal volume and the dispersion of analysts forecasts. Our findings suggest that market participants may use the 20-F reconciliation in trading decisions.     

Price and Volatility Spillovers in the Case of Stock Markets Located in Different Time Zones

This paper investigates the interdependence of price volatility across the U.S. stock market and two emerging markets: Poland and Hungary. Using daily data for countries located in different time zones, we point out the problems caused by the presence of nonsynchronous trading effects. To address this problem we use open-to-close logarithmic returns of major stock market indexes. The asymmetric impact of good and bad news is described by a multivariate exponential general autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic model. We investigate the sample from May 2004 to December 2011. The evidence is that the U.S. prices spill over to other markets. Our results show no pronounced volatility spillovers among the three examined markets. Moreover, we observe the presence of negative asymmetry in the case of all markets.     

卖空限制与收益可预测性——A股融资融券制度的证据

基于A股市场融资和融券余额的巨大差距,本文拓展了Hong et al.(2016)的理论模型,在融券端和融资端分别找到了影响股票收益率的变量:融券比率(融券余额/流通市值)和融资回补天数(融资比率/日均换手率)。进一步,本文利用组合价差法和Fama-MacBeth横截面回归法,实证检验了A股市场中融券比率与融资回补天数解释和预测股票收益率的能力。实证结果表明,在存在融券限制条件下,融券比率相比融券回补天数(融券比率/日均换手率)能更好地代表套利者对股票价格高估程度的看法,根据融券比率构建的等权重多空组合能带来月均1.58%的显著收益;而由于融资约束相对较少,融资回补天数相比融资比率(融资余额/流通市值)能更好地代表套利者对股票价格低估程度的看法,根据融资回补天数构建的等权重多空组合能带来月均1.28%的显著收益。实证结果与本文存在融券数量限制下的理论模型相符,且该收益率不能被多因子模型和常规股票特征所解释。     

Quantifying preferential trading in the e-MID interbank market

Interbank markets allow credit institutions to exchange capital for purposes of liquidity management. These markets are among the most liquid markets in the financial system. However, liquidity of interbank markets dropped during the 2007–2008 financial crisis, and such a lack of liquidity influenced the entire economic system. In this paper, we analyse transaction data from the e-MID market which is the only electronic interbank market in the Euro Area and US, over a period of 11 years (1999–2009). We adapt a method developed to detect statistically validated links in a network, in order to reveal preferential trading in a directed network. Preferential trading between banks is detected by comparing empirically observed trading relationships with a null hypothesis that assumes random trading among banks doing a heterogeneous number of transactions. Preferential trading patterns are revealed at time windows of 3-maintenance periods. We show that preferential trading is observed throughout the whole period of analysis and that the number of preferential trading links does not show any significant trend in time, in spite of a decreasing trend in the number of pairs of banks making transactions. We observe that preferential trading connections typically involve large trading volumes. During the crisis, we also observe that transactions occurring between banks with a preferential connection occur at larger interest rates than the complement set—an effect that is not observed before the crisis.     

Trading costs, liquidity, and asset holdings

In this article I develop a model that accounts for interdependencebetween trading costs in various asset markets arising fromthe optimizing behavior of liquidity traders. The model suggeststhat noise trading is an important determinant of the liquidityof asset markets and provides a positive theory for diversifiedasset holdings by risk-neutral liquidity traders.     

Transmission of movements in stock markets

The paper analyses the relationships between three stock markets: New York, Tokyo and Frankfurt. The non-simultaneity of the trading times in these three markets determines the results of cross-correlations and regressions with daily returns. To cope with this and other problems, an empirical model is proposed and estimated. This model allows the separation of the ability to influence and the sensitivity of the different markets, and New York is found to be the most influential market, with Tokyo the most sensitive.     

Reversal of Monday returns

This paper elaborates an interesting aspect of the Monday anomaly: Monday returns are relatively more likely to reverse over the subsequent days. We document that, although the Monday low-return anomaly disappeared, the subsequent reversal of Monday returns remains robust to date. The reversals, measured over a five-day horizon, are pervasive across international stock markets, reasonably stable over time, significant following both positive and negative Monday returns, and not confined to extreme Monday returns. Trading strategies designed to exploit these reversals earn economic profits. We examine potential explanations for the reversal of Monday returns using trading flows data of investor types from Korea. All predictions of the Foster and Viswanathan [J. Finance, 1993, 48, 187–211] model are confirmed: volatility is higher, trading volume is lower, market depth is lower and price impact costs are higher on Mondays. The model implies lower price quality on Mondays, but does not specifically predict reversal of Monday returns. We show that the trading intensity of international/institutional investors is lower on Mondays. This appears to make the market relatively more susceptible to individual investors’ trading, which is negatively correlated with international/institutional investors. Thus, Monday returns are relatively more likely to reverse during the subsequent days of the week when institutional investors trade more aggressively.     

Nonstationarity of efficient finance markets: FX market evolution from stability to instability

Real financial markets are uncertain on the shortest trading time scales, therefore trading translates into noise. We discuss the pair correlations of detrended returns necessary to understand financial markets. Efficient markets and equilibrium markets generate conflicting pair correlations. B. Eichengreen [B. Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital,: A History of the International Monetary System, Princeton, Princeton, 1998] argues that FX speculation was stabilizing before WWI. In contrast, our recent empirical analysis shows that we can model FX markets in our present era as nonstationary/unstable and efficient (meaning hard or impossible to beat). We can model pre-WWI non-efficient equilibrium FX dynamics from a closely related theoretical standpoint. Our main points are that deregulated markets are described by a nonstationary process with uncorrelated, nonstationary increments, and that a stationary market (equilibrium market) is mutually exclusive with an unregulated, efficient market. In short, stability and deregulation are mutually exclusive ideas. We review a simple, empirically deduced model of the unstable diffusive nature of volatile FX market dynamics. All information of interest is encoded in the variable diffusion coefficient defining the observed martingale process.     

Market Efficiency and the Returns to Simple Technical Trading Rules: New Evidence from U.S. Equity Market and Chinese Equity Markets

Numerous studies in the finance literature have investigated technical analysis to determine its validity as an investment tool. This study is an attempt to explore whether some forms of technical analysis can predict stock price movement and make excess profits based on certain trading rules in markets with different efficiency level. To avoid using arbitrarily selected 26 trading rules as did by Brock, Lakonishok and LeBaron (1992) and later by Bessembinder and Chan (1998), this paper examines predictive power and profitability of simple trading rules by expanding their universe of 26 rules to 412 rules. In order to find out the relationship between market efficiency and excess return by applying trading rules, we examine excess return over periods in U.S. markets and also compare the excess returns between U.S. market and Chinese markets. Our results found that there is no evidence at all supporting technical forecast power by these trading rules in U.S. equity index after 1975. During the 1990s break-even costs turned to be negative, –0.06%, even failing to beat a buy-holding strategyin U.S. equity market. In comparison, our results provide support for the technical strategies even in the presence of trading cost in Chinese stock markets.     

Information transfer,microstmctures and intraday price return spikes

Previous research has identified overnight public information as the cause of higher opening returns and mean reversion in security markets. This paper tests this hypothesis by using an intervention and transfer function time series model to filter out the dynamic effects of an overnight information set on the opening, and subsequent, intraday AOI stock and SPI futures intraday price returns. A further research objective was to analyse the process by which information is transferred into prices and whether there is a differential impact across stock and futures markets. It was determined that the information contained in the overnight US stock market had: (i) a differential impact on the Australian stock and futures market, and (ii) after filtering out the impact of overnight information, a significant reversal tendency remained in both markets after opening. Further analysis supported the conclusion that price spikes at opening were not wholly related to overnight information. Other possible explanations, such as different trading mechanisms, did not provide a satisfactory explanation. Overall, it appears that the uncertainty participants face at the beginning of a trading session may induce a number of subtle market reactions (both rational and irrational), in markets with different microstmctures and trading clientele.     

FX technical trading rules can be profitable sometimes!

This paper investigates the profitability of technical trading rules in the foreign exchange market taking into account data snooping bias and transaction costs. A universe of 7650 trading rules is applied to six currencies quoted in U.S. dollars over the 1994:3–2014:12 period. The Barras, Scaillet, and Wermers (2010) false discovery rate method is employed to deal with data snooping and it detects almost all outperforming trading rules while keeping the proportion of false discoveries to a pre-specified level. The out-of-sample results reveal a large number of outperforming rules that are profitable over short periods based on the Sharpe ratio. However, they are not consistently profitable and so the overall results are more consistent with the adaptive markets hypothesis.     

Latent liquidity: A new measure of liquidity,with an application to corporate bonds

We present a new measure of liquidity known as “latent liquidity” and apply it to a unique corporate bond database. Latent liquidity is defined as the weighted average turnover of investors who hold a bond, in which the weights are the fractional investor holdings. It can be used to measure liquidity in markets with sparse transactions data. For bonds that trade frequently, our measure has predictive power for both transaction costs and the price impact of trading, over and above trading activity and bond-specific characteristics thought to be related to liquidity. Additionally, this measure exhibits relationships with bond characteristics similar to those of other trade-based measures.     

Migration,spillovers, and trade diversion: The impact of internationalization on domestic stock market activity

This paper studies the relation between internationalization (firms cross-listing, issuing depositary receipts, or raising capital in international stock markets) and the trading activity of the remaining firms in domestic markets. Using a panel of 3000 firms from 55 emerging economies during 1989–2000, we find that internationalization is negatively related to the trading activity of domestic firms. We identify two channels. First, the trading of international firms migrates from domestic to international markets and this migration along with the reduction in domestic trading of international firms has negative spillover effects on domestic firm trading activity. Second, there is trade diversion within domestic markets as trading activity shifts out of domestic firms and into international firms.     

Financial Markets,Ageing and Social Welfare

This paper considers some of the economic impacts that demographic change may have in developed economies over the next fifty years. I focus on the role that financial markets might play in economies where the pressure on government-run unfunded pension systems is likely to rise. The role of unfunded schemes is considered in a world where financial markets are incomplete and important types of risk cannot easily be offset by trading. How demographic shifts might affect labour productivity, asset prices and aggregate output is investigated using a simulation model of an economy where population structure is changing. JEL classification: E21, E60, G10, H1.