Is All That Talk Just Noise? The Information Content of Internet Stock Message Boards

Financial press reports claim that Internet stock message boards can move markets. We study the effect of more than 1.5 million messages posted on Yahoo! Finance and Raging Bull about the 45 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Dow Jones Internet Index. Bullishness is measured using computational linguistics methods. Wall Street Journal news stories are used as controls. We find that stock messages help predict market volatility. Their effect on stock returns is statistically significant but economically small. Consistent with Harris and Raviv (1993) , disagreement among the posted messages is associated with increased trading volume.     

The Impact of Firm-Specific Public News on Intraday Market Dynamics: Evidence from the Turkish Stock Market

This study attempts to discover the intraday firm-specific news announcements and return volatility relation in the Turkish stock market. The GARCH framework is utilized to investigate the impact of firm-specific public news announcements on volatility persistence with and without trading volume. For the majority of the stocks in the sample, the volatility persistence diminishes with the inclusion of firm-specific news, implying that news is impounded rapidly into prices. This effect is more pronounced for larger stocks. When there is no news, the trading volume does not appear to reduce the volatility persistence for the majority of stocks, possibly due to the presence of private information possessed by informed traders.     

Trading volume in options and common stock around quarterly earnings announcements

This study examines trading in call and put options around quarterly earnings announcements and investigates whether the existence of these options affects the common stock trading volume response to these announcements. We find that the options trading volume reaction to earnings announcements is larger than the corresponding reaction in common stock. Consistent with the idea that options provide an alternative vehicle for trading on information, the existence of these options lowers the level of trading in common stock. Options also appear to offer investors an alternative method of taking short positions, as shown by the symmetric stock market trading volume reaction to good versus bad news for firms with listed options. In contrast, firms without listed options exhibit a larger trading volume response to good news than to bad news of similar magnitude.     

The role of the media in disseminating insider-trading news

We use the process through which insider trading (SEC Form 4) filings are made public to investigate whether media coverage affects the way securities markets assimilate news. To do this, we use recent changes in disclosure rules governing insider trades as well as the initiation of coverage by Dow Jones to cleanly identify media effects. Using high-resolution intraday data, we find clear effects of media dissemination on the way prices and volume respond to insider trading news in the minutes after its release. These results help to resolve open questions regarding the role of the media in capital markets, including why apparently second hand news affects securities prices.     

Impact of macroeconomic news on metal futures

This paper uses intra-day data for the period 2002 through 2008 to examine the intensity, direction, and speed of impact of US macroeconomic news announcements on the return, volatility and trading volume of three important commodities - gold, silver and copper futures. We find that the response of metal futures to economic news surprises is both swift and significant, with the 8:30 am set of announcements - in particular, nonfarm payrolls and durable goods orders - having the largest impact. Furthermore, announcements that reflect an unexpected improvement in the economy tend to have a negative impact on gold and silver prices; however, they tend to have a positive effect on copper prices. In comparison, realized volatility and volume for all three metals are positively influenced by economic news. Finally, there is evidence that several news announcements exert an asymmetric impact on market activity variables.     

FT coverage and UK target price run-ups

We focus on the market expectation hypothesis to explain the increase in share prices and trading volume of target firms before their merger announcements that have conventionally been attributed to either insider trading or market expectation. We use Financial Times (FT) coverage as a proxy of merger expectation and search for relevant articles for 783 UK target firms between 1998 and 2010. We identify a total of 1049 rumour articles and find that the FT market expectation proxy explains a small percentage of the target price run-ups. Results are strong during the sample period, even though the magnitude for both returns and trading volume tends to decrease within recent years. There is also a strong contemporaneous relation between abnormal returns and trading volume. Unexplained increases in target prices and trading volume may be attributed to insider trading.     

Testing for Linear and Nonlinear Granger Causality in the Stock Price-Volume Relation

Linear and nonlinear Granger causality tests are used to examine the dynamic relation between daily Dow Jones stock returns and percentage changes in New York Stock Exchange trading volume. We find evidence of significant bidirectional nonlinear causality between returns and volume. We also examine whether the nonlinear causality from volume to returns can be explained by volume serving as a proxy for information flow in the stochastic process generating stock return variance as suggested by Clark's (1973) latent common-factor model. After controlling for volatility persistence in returns, we continue to find evidence of nonlinear causality from volume to returns.     

The options market response to accounting earnings announcements

We examine the reaction of the equity options market to accounting earnings announcements over the period 1996–2008 using changes in implied volatility to measure the options market response to earnings news. We find that positive earnings surprises and positive profit announcements produce a larger uncertainty resolution than negative earnings surprises and loss announcements. We demonstrate an inverse relation between the change in implied volatility and earnings news in a three-day window immediately after an earnings announcement. We refer to the magnitude of this relation as the ‘options market earnings response coefficient’. This ‘options market earnings response coefficient’ is stronger for both bad news announcements and positive profit announcements. We do not find any significant relation between changes in implied volatility and earnings news in the pre- or post-announcement periods. We conclude that the options market efficiently absorbs earnings information.     

Driven to Distraction: Extraneous Events and Underreaction to Earnings News

Recent studies propose that limited investor attention causes market underreactions. This paper directly tests this explanation by measuring the information load faced by investors. The  investor distraction hypothesis  holds that extraneous news inhibits market reactions to relevant news. We find that the immediate price and volume reaction to a firm's earnings surprise is much weaker, and post-announcement drift much stronger, when a greater number of same-day earnings announcements are made by other firms. We evaluate the economic importance of distraction effects through a trading strategy, which yields substantial alphas. Industry-unrelated news and large earnings surprises have a stronger distracting effect.     

Market Liquidity and Trading Activity

Previous studies of liquidity span short time periods and focus on the individual security. In contrast, we study aggregate market spreads, depths, and trading activity for U.S. equities over an extended time sample. Daily changes in market averages of liquidity and trading activity are highly volatile and negatively serially dependent. Liquidity plummets significantly in down markets. Recent market volatility induces a decrease in trading activity and spreads. There are strong day-of-the-week effects; Fridays accompany a significant decrease in trading activity and liquidity, while Tuesdays display the opposite pattern. Long- and short-term interest rates influence liquidity. Depth and trading activity increase just prior to major macroeconomic announcements.     

The type of corporate announcements and its implication on trading behaviour

I report the empirical evidence to show how firms’ expected and unexpected announcements affect investors’ trading behaviour. I find that trading volume decreases before expected announcements, either scheduled or unscheduled, consistent with models that predict that discretionary liquidity traders may postpone their trading until after an anticipated news release. I also find that the magnitude of pre-announcement trading reactions is negatively associated with the level of pre-disclosure information asymmetry. I further find that trading volume is boosted before unexpected announcements, and the relation between the magnitude of pre-announcement trading reactions and the pre-disclosure information asymmetry is weakly significant or insignificant.     

Reactions of the London Stock Exchange to Company Trading Statement Announcements

Using event study methodology, we examine market reactions to nearly 2,000 trading statements during the period 1995‐2001. We find that profit warnings outnumber upgrades by 50%, and, in line with previous US studies, we find that market reaction to the actual announcements is considerably greater for profit warnings than for upgrades.Sub-samples demonstrate significant market reaction to profit warnings for all sizecontrolled portfolios, but that reaction to the announcements is greatest for small companies.Examination of pre- and post-announcement CARs shows no pre-announcement market anticipation of the announcements.Post-announcement there is a significant positive abnormal return on the day after the announcement of bad news for the small company subsample.Other post-announcement results are small and insignificant.Trading volume results are consistent with this picture. Finally, when the trading statements are examined for news on turnover and margin changes, we find that the market reaction to margin changes is greater than market reaction to turnover changes.     

Stock market trading activity and returns around milestones

We study the relation between daily stock market trading activity and the Dow Jones Industrial Average's (DJIA) movement around millenary milestones—numbers that end in three zeros. We find aggregate turnover to be 5% lower when the DJIA level is less than 1% away from the nearest milestone. The effect emerges as the DJIA approaches a milestone from below, and is stronger for first-time milestones compared to subsequent passages. The aggregate price impact is large, such that daily stock returns show a negative abnormal performance of − 10 basis points. Our findings suggest that millenary milestones of the DJIA play a role in some investors' decision making.     

Is there information content from insider trading activities preceding earnings and dividend announcements in Hong Kong?

This study examines whether insiders (directors) exploit information advantage of their firms by trading stocks before the simultaneous earnings and dividend announcements in Hong Kong. Our findings show that there are significant net-insider-buying activities before the announcements of good news ('Earnings-Dividend Increase') and significant net-insider-selling activities before bad news ('Earnings-Dividend Decrease' and 'Earnings Decrease-Dividend Zero'). In addition, our regression results provide some support for the hypothesis that there is a predictive relation between pre-event insider trading activity and the abnormal return of the announcements.     

How does news sentiment affect the states of Japanese stock return volatility?

This paper examines the impact of public news sentiment on the volatility states of firm-level returns on the Japanese Stock market. We firstly adopt a novel Markov Regime Switching Long Memory GARCH (MRS-LMGARCH), which is employed to estimate the latent volatility states of intraday stock return. By using the RavenPack Dow Jones News Analytics database, we fit discrete choice models to investigate the impact of news sentiment on changes of volatility states of the constituent stocks in the TOPIX Core 30 Index. Our findings suggest that news occurrence and sentiment, especially those of macro-economic news, are a key factor that significantly drives the volatility state of Japanese stock returns. This provides essential information for traders of the Japanese stock market to optimize their trading strategies and risk management plans to combat volatility.     

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.     

The Inter-Temporal Behavior of Informed and Uninformed Traders

The purpose of this study is to investigate the inter-temporal trading behavior of informed and uninformed investors. We estimate a variation of the market microstructure model developed in Easley, Keifer, O'Hara, and Paperman (1996) and document the day-of-the-week pattern in informed and uninformed trading, as well as the probability of an information event and the probability of bad news. Using bootstrapped distributions, we show that the probability of trading against informed investors follows a U-shape pattern from Monday to Friday. Cross-sectional regression results suggest that inter-temporal patterns between informed and uninformed traders can generate observed patterns in liquidity provision costs.     

Options trading volume and stock price response to earnings announcements

We examine the effect of options trading volume on the stock price response to earnings announcements over the period 1996–2007. Contrary to previous studies, we find no significant difference in the immediate stock price response to earnings information announcements in samples split between firms with listed options and firms without listed options. However, within the sample of firms with listed options stratified by options volume, we find that higher options trading volume reduces the immediate stock price response to earnings announcements. This conforms with evidence that stock prices of high options trading volume firms have anticipated and pre-empted some earnings information in the pre-announcement period. We also find that higher abnormal options trading volume around earnings announcements hastens the stock price adjustment to earnings news and reduces post-earnings announcement drift.     

AN ANALYSIS OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL'S COVERAGE OF CORPORATE NEWS AND THE RESEARCH DESIGN OF EVENT STUDIES

The typical event study of corporate news restricts its sample of announcements to events reported in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and listed in the WSJ Index. In this paper we examine whether such samples are representative of the events omitted from the WSJ. Focusing on convertible calls in the 1980s, we analyze possible differences between a sample based only on the WSJ Index and a larger but similarly constructed sample of calls reported in the Dow Jones News Service but not in the WSJ Index. Numerous parametric and nonparametric tests reveal no significant cross-sample divergences in key attributes of the calling firms and called bonds, or in the distributions of risk-adjusted returns around announcements. This evidence suggests that WSJ-based samples for other corporate news items can be representative of cases not covered by the WSJ. Further, the evidence indicates that the results of event studies using WSJ-based samples may support inferences about events not reported in the newspaper.     

Trading Volume, Information Asymmetry, and Timing Information

This paper investigates trading volume before scheduled and unscheduled corporate announcements to explore how traders respond to private information. I show that cumulative trading volume decreases inversely to information asymmetry prior to scheduled announcements, while the opposite relation holds for volume after the announcement. In contrast, trading volume before unscheduled announcements increases dramatically and shows little relation to proxies for information asymmetry. I investigate the behavior of market makers and find that they act appropriately by increasing price sensitivity before all announcements, implying that they extract timing information from their order books.