Stock price decreases prior to executive stock option grants

This study examines abnormal stock price changes prior to executive stock option grants. Executives have the incentive and opportunity to manage the timing of their communications of inside information to the market during the period just prior to the date of their stock-option grant so as to reduce the exercise price of their options. Executives benefit from temporary stock price decreases before the grant date and by stock price increases after the grant date. Executive stock option grants create a unique opportunity for insiders to profit by manipulating the timing of information flowing to the market without engaging in insider trading. Using data on 783 stock-option grants to chief executive officers, we find a statistically significant abnormal decrease in stock prices during the 10-day period immediately preceding the grant date.     

IQ and corporate insiders’ decisions to time insider and outsider trading

We examine how corporate insiders’ cognitive ability (IQ) affects their decisions to time insider and outsider trading before abnormal stock price changes. Our analysis of archival data on male corporate insiders in Sweden shows they are less prone to time their insider selling and to sell in larger amounts, before abnormal stock price declines as IQ increases. We also find that insiders with a higher IQ are better at timing their outsider buying. Taken together, our results show that corporate insiders’ IQ affects their trading decisions differently, depending on whether they are trading in their insider or outsider stocks.     

Hedge funds and their prime broker analysts

Are sell-side analysts reluctant to go against the investment views of their hedge funds when these hedge funds are their prime brokerage clients? We show that prime broker analysts tend to upgrade stocks recently bought by their clients. For stocks with upgraded recommendations, post-announcement cumulative abnormal returns are significantly lower for those purchased by the prime brokerage clients. Our results are stronger with high-dollar-turnover clients who generate more trading commissions. We also find that a hedge fund with a large bet on a stock has a stronger incentive to pressure the fund’s prime brokers to issue a favorable recommendation on the stock. Results are not driven by stocks of firms with low analyst coverage or small size.     

Do fire sales create externalities?

We develop three novel measures of the incentives of equity mutual funds to internalize the price impact of their trading. We show that mutual funds with stronger incentives to internalize their price impact accommodate inflows and outflows by adjusting their cash buffers instead of trading in portfolio securities. As a result, stocks held by these funds have lower volatility, and flows out of these funds have smaller spillover effects on other funds holding the same securities. Our results provide evidence of meaningful fire sale externalities in the equity mutual fund industry.     

Do Funds Make More When They Trade More?

We model fund turnover in the presence of time‐varying profit opportunities. Our model predicts a positive relation between an active fund's turnover and its subsequent benchmark‐adjusted return. We find such a relation for equity mutual funds. This time‐series relation between turnover and performance is stronger than the cross‐sectional relation, as the model predicts. Also as predicted, the turnover‐performance relation is stronger for funds trading less‐liquid stocks and funds likely to possess greater skill. Turnover is correlated across funds. The common component of turnover is positively correlated with proxies for stock mispricing. Turnover of similar funds helps predict a fund's performance.     

中国公募基金挖掘了股票市场异象吗？

公募基金是我国重要的机构投资者之一,分析其投资逻辑对理解机构投资者行为和公募基金的选择至关重要。基于2005年至2019年主动管理偏股型开放式基金数据,本文检验了公募基金对A股市场87个异象因子的挖掘。为解决因子维度过大问题,本文采用非参方法从87个异象因子中提取有效信息的综合指标A-Score,并根据基金持仓构建基金的异象投资指标AIM(Anomalies Investing Measure)。结果显示:(1)中国公募基金挖掘了市场异象;(2)利用AIM可以选择表现更好的基金,并能获得0.45%的月度多空组合收益;(3)基金经理的选股能力、风格选择能力和风控能力是其挖掘异象收益的主要来源;(4)异象挖掘可以为基金带来长期资金流,同时也缓和了市场的错误定价。     

IPO限价发行与新股二级市场价格泡沫——论股票市场“弹簧效应”

本文通过对比2009年7月1日至2014年6月30日IPO市场化定价发行阶段与2014年7月1日至2018年6月30日IPO限价发行阶段共1950个IPO样本,发现IPO限价发行对于新股在二级市场股价表现具有"弹簧效应":即抑制股票一级市场发行价格会造成新股在二级市场价格短期内超涨,限价发行新股的二级市场定价显著高于市场化定价发行新股的二级市场定价。限价发行引起的过高二级市场定价最终导致股票长期回报率低下。另外,创业板公司"弹簧效应"显著强于主板公司。这些实证结果都可以被本文提出的一级市场价格压抑造成二级市场非理性投资者上涨预期一致、盲目追涨的理论模型所解释。本文的研究指出抑制股票一级市场定价虽然形式上可以解决新股发行价过高问题,但是却造成二级市场更大的价格扭曲。这一发现为进一步完善我国IPO发行定价机制提供了依据。     

Mutual Fund Herding and the Impact on Stock Prices

We analyze the trading activity of the mutual fund industry from 1975 through 1994 to determine whether funds "herd" when they trade stocks and to investigate the impact of herding on stock prices. Although we find little herding by mutual funds in the average stock, we find much higher levels in trades of small stocks and in trading by growth-oriented funds. Stocks that herds buy outperform stocks that they sell by 4 percent during the following six months; this return difference is much more pronounced among small stocks. Our results are consistent with mutual fund herding speeding the price-adjustment process.     

Tax noncompliance and insider trading

This paper explores whether insiders who have shown noncompliance with the tax law (‘noncompliant insiders’) are more prone to exploit their information advantage in insider trading, compared to other insiders (‘compliant insiders’). Our empirical results from analyzing archival data of all insider trades in Sweden show that noncompliant insiders use more of their information advantage to trade their insider stocks shortly before significant stock price changes, compared to compliant insiders. These results remain similar after controlling for various insider- and firm-specific determinants of insider returns, including firm and year fixed effects. We believe that our results are of interest for academics and regulatory authorities monitoring and screening insider trading activity.     

WHO ARE THE NOISE TRADERS?

Closed‐end funds often trade at a discount to net asset value. Previous research suggests that the positive correlation in discounts is associated with investor sentiment that causes systematic mispricing by noise traders. We use a newly available sample of daily fund valuations to examine the relation between intraday trading activity and discount changes. Contrary to the assumption that retail investors are noise traders, we find no relation between discount changes and the order‐flow imbalances of individual investors. Large daily discount changes are associated with institutional trading, and this may reflect the price inelasticity of closed‐end fund shares.     

Flight-to-liquidity,market uncertainty,and the actions of mutual fund investors

We explore the trading decisions of equity mutual funds during ten periods of extreme market uncertainty. We find that mutual funds reduced their aggregate holdings of illiquid stocks. Exploring the drivers behind this result reveals that this is mainly driven by larger withdrawals from funds that hold less liquid stocks. We further find that the sell-off of illiquid stocks occurred only after initial deterioration in market conditions, consistent with retail investors’ response to bad performance. At a broader level, this shows that mutual funds consumed liquidity during periods where liquidity was most valuable. Moreover, the fact that fund managers traded in response to these withdrawals suggests a potentially magnifying channel for the drop in illiquid stock prices, also known as flight-to-liquidity.     

Front-running of mutual fund fire-sales

We show that a real-time trading strategy which front-runs the anticipated forced sales by mutual funds experiencing extreme capital outflows generates an alpha of 0.5% per month during the 1990–2010 period. The abnormal return stems from selling pressure among stocks that are below the NYSE mean size and cannot be attributed to the arrival of public information. While the largest stocks also exhibit downward price pressure, their prices revert before the front-running strategy can detect it. The duration of the anticipated selling pressure has decreased from about a month in the 1990s to about two weeks in the most recent decade. Our results suggest that publicly available information of fund flows and holdings exposes mutual funds in distress to predatory trading.     

Index arbitrage and the pricing relationship between Australian stock index futures and their underlying shares

This paper examines the mispricing of Australian stock index futures. Exogenous and endogenous price volatility is confirmed to have a positive impact on the mispricing spread, after filtering out predictable time series components. More accurate pricing associated with surprise trading volume in the underlying stocks is consistent with arbitrageurs acting to narrow price disparities relative to the futures market. Ex‐ante interest rate volatility is the primary source of risk faced by arbitrageurs and fluctuations in the transaction cost of opening index arbitrage positions influence the extent to which they drive prices towards theoretical fair values.     

隐性杠杆约束、流动性风险和投资者情绪

本文以2003—2019年间开放式主动管理型的股票型和偏股型基金为样本,以持仓占比为权重估算基金投组中A股的总市场风险暴露,检验结果表明,该序列上升反映了基金面临的隐性杠杆约束收紧,刻画了市场的弱流动性。内在逻辑在于,流动性收紧时,投资者难以通过融资直接增加杠杆,更倾向于重仓持有高市场风险头寸的股票而间接实现杠杆。本文发现隐性杠杆约束所刻画的风险在股票或基金收益截面上的无条件定价基本失效,而条件定价则依赖于低市场情绪与弱流动性。分解基金持股的敞口,进一步发现,因中小盘基金在流动性收紧时具有更强的流动性偏好,其持股的市场风险头寸能够更敏锐地捕捉到弱流动性风险。     

Arbitrage,Liquidity, and the Valuation of Exchange Traded Funds

This paper investigates the performance of U.S. and country exchange traded funds currently traded in the United States and provides new insight into their pricing. While the U.S. funds are priced closely to their net asset values, the country funds are not and can exhibit large, positive autocorrelations in fund premium. The mispricing of country funds is related to momentum, illiquidity, and size effects. We also find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between fund premium and market liquidity, which suggests that more active trading does lead to lower mispricing but only after a certain level of liquidity is reached.     

Exchange traded funds and asset return correlations

We provide novel evidence supporting the notion that arbitrageurs can contribute to return comovement via exchange trade funds (ETF) arbitrage. Using a large sample of US equity ETF holdings, we document the link between measures of ETF activity and return comovement at both the fund and the stock levels, after controlling for a host of variables and fixed effects and by exploiting the ‘discontinuity’ between stock indices. The effect is also stronger among small and illiquid stocks. An examination of ETF return autocorrelations and stock lagged beta provides evidence for price reversal, suggesting that some ETF‐driven return comovement may be excessive.     

Mandatory Portfolio Disclosure,Stock Liquidity,and Mutual Fund Performance

We examine the impact of mandatory portfolio disclosure by mutual funds on stock liquidity and fund performance. We develop a model of informed trading with disclosure and test its predictions using the May 2004 SEC regulation requiring more frequent disclosure. Stocks with higher fund ownership, especially those held by more informed funds or subject to greater information asymmetry, experience larger increases in liquidity after the regulation change. More informed funds, especially those holding stocks with greater information asymmetry, experience greater performance deterioration after the regulation change. Overall, mandatory disclosure improves stock liquidity but imposes costs on informed investors.     

Insider Trading and Voluntary Disclosures

We hypothesize that insiders strategically choose disclosure policies and the timing of their equity trades to maximize trading profits, subject to the litigation costs associated with disclosure and insider trading. Accounting for endogeneity between disclosures and trading, we find that when managers plan to purchase shares, they increase the number of bad news forecasts to reduce the purchase price. In addition, this relation is stronger for trades initiated by chief executive officers than for those initiated by other executives. Confirming this strategic behavior, we find that managers successfully time their trades around bad news forecasts, buying fewer shares beforehand and more afterwards. We do not find that managers adjust their forecasting activity when they are selling shares, consistent with higher litigation concerns associated with insider sales. Overall, our evidence suggests that insiders do exploit voluntary disclosure opportunities for personal gain, but only selectively, when litigation risk is sufficiently low.     

Connected Stocks

We connect stocks through their common active mutual fund owners. We show that the degree of shared ownership forecasts cross‐sectional variation in return correlation, controlling for exposure to systematic return factors, style and sector similarity, and many other pair characteristics. We argue that shared ownership causes this excess comovement based on evidence from a natural experiment—the 2003 mutual fund trading scandal. These results motivate a novel cross‐stock‐reversal trading strategy exploiting information contained in ownership connections. We show that long‐short hedge fund index returns covary negatively with this strategy, suggesting these funds may exacerbate this excess comovement.     

Insider trading,future earnings,and post-earnings announcement drift

This paper examines the association between insider trading prior to quarterly earnings announcements and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We conjecture and find that insider trades reflect insiders’ private information about the persistence of earnings news. Thus, insider trades can help investors better understand and incorporate the time-series properties of quarterly earnings into stock prices in a timely and unbiased manner, thereby mitigating PEAD. As predicted, PEAD is significantly lower when earnings announcements are preceded by insider trading. The reduction in PEAD is driven by contradictory insider trades (i.e., net buys before large negative earnings news or net sells before large positive earnings news) and is more pronounced in the presence of more sophisticated market participants. Consistent with investors extracting and trading on insiders’ private information, pre-announcement insider trading is associated with smaller market reactions to future earnings news in each of the four subsequent quarters. Overall, our findings indicate insider trading contributes to stock price efficiency by conveying insiders’ private information about future earnings and especially the persistence of earnings news.