Effects of order flow imbalance on short-horizon contrarian strategies in the Australian equity market

We use Lo and MacKinlay's [Lo, A.W., MacKinlay, C., 1990. When are contrarian profits due to stock market overreaction? The Review of Financial Studies 3, 175–205.] contrarian portfolio approach to examine the profitability of short-horizon contrarian strategies in the context of the Australian Stock Exchange. The results show that simple contrarian strategies lead to small but still statistically significant profits when applied to daily and intra-day portfolio formation. However, the profits are not sufficient to cover transaction costs for institutional investors. The source of contrarian profits is also analyzed leading to the conclusion that stock market overreaction is found to be the primary source of contrarian profits. We also examine the relation between the degree of return reversal and order flow activity after abnormal price changes. We find that the degree of return reversal is positively related to the level of order flow imbalance. Larger profits are generated from order flow based contrarian strategies when the order flow imbalances are high.     

On the source of contrarian and momentum strategies in the Italian equity market

This paper investigates the source of momentum profits, while inferring the validity of the assumptions underlying rational and behavioural theories. Using a unique sample of securities listed in the Italian Stock Exchange from 1950 to 1995, we observe that buying better performing stocks in the previous 3-12 months and selling worse performing stocks over the same period yields significant profits in the short term (less than 1 year). Results also hold when conditioned upon different risk specifications. On the other hand, the continuation effect seems to significantly revert over a longer period. More importantly, in contrast with Conrad and Kaul [Rev. Financ. Stud. 11 (1998) 489], bootstrap and Monte Carlo simulations show that momentum profits are more likely to be generated by stock returns time series properties rather than by their cross-sectional differences. While the overall findings cannot reject the market efficiency hypothesis, we argue that behavioural theory may be a possible “story” to interpret the continuation effect.     

Informed trading under different market conditions and moneyness: Evidence from TXO options

We examine the informational role of options across exercise prices under different market conditions. We analyze the influence of options' leverage effect, and market cycles on the cause–effect relation between stock and options markets based on an emerging options market—the Taiwan stock index options market. When aggregating market data irrespective of market cycles and options moneyness, we find that the equity market leads the options market. However, as we control options' moneyness and market cycles, we find that out-of-the-money options lead the stock market by up to 90 min with more pronounced results in downtrends and periods of political tension. Our findings suggest that the informational role of options is interacted with leverage effect and market conditions.     

Asymmetric downside risk across different sectors of the US equity market

This study integrates a threshold-mean equation with an asymmetric power autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (APARCH) model to examine the behavior of sector-specific exchange-traded funds (ETFs) during extreme market downturns between December 23, 1998, and November 2, 2022. Thus, predetermined and optimal boundary points are applied to the extreme left tail of the return distribution to assess the extent of downside risk differentials inside and outside the extreme drawdown zone without splitting the sample period. According to the findings, the betas of the ETFs XLI, XLP, XLV, and XLY are comparable under both extreme and nonextreme market conditions. In contrast, XLF, XLE, and XLU have higher downside betas during extreme market conditions compared with their nonextreme betas, while XLB and XLK exhibit the opposite pattern. The results remain robust and consistent regardless of how the boundary points are established. The estimated models in this study were successfully subjected to a series of diagnostic tests, suggesting that the commonly held view about asymmetric responses in different market conditions does not apply to all market segments.     

A new approach to measuring riskiness in the equity market: Implications for the risk premium

We introduce a new approach to measuring riskiness in the equity market. We propose option implied and physical measures of riskiness and investigate their performance in predicting future market returns. The predictive regressions indicate a positive and significant relation between time-varying riskiness and expected market returns. The significantly positive link between aggregate riskiness and market risk premium remains intact after controlling for the S&P 500 index option implied volatility (VIX), aggregate idiosyncratic volatility, and a large set of macroeconomic variables. We also provide alternative explanations for the positive relation by showing that aggregate riskiness is higher during economic downturns characterized by high aggregate risk aversion and high expected returns.     

A finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the US equity market: Will the US equity market eventually collapse?

Fitting Dow Jones 30 index data for the 1790–1999 period into a log-periodic power-law singularity (LPPLS) model, the seminal paper by Johansen and Sornette (2001) was the first to show that the US equity growth rate is accelerating such that the market is growing as a power law toward a spontaneous singularity. Their model suggests that the US equity market will reach this critical point in the year 2052 ± 10 years, signaling an abrupt transition to a new regime. This study re-examines this important issue using (i) a novel approach to calibrate the LPPLS model and (ii) a different data set including >20 years of additional data. The extended data account for the dot.com bubble burst (2000), the Global Financial Crisis period (2008–2009), the COVID−19 crisis (2020−2022), and the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian war (starting in 2022), which are all events with severe consequences for the global economy. The calibrated LPPLS model suggests that the US equity market will reach a singularity condition by June 2050.     

The determinants of a cross market arbitrage opportunity: theory and evidence for the European bond market

This paper examines the determinants of cross-platform arbitrage profits. We develop a structural model that enables us to decompose the likelihood of an arbitrage opportunity into three distinct factors: the fixed cost to trade the opportunity, the level at which one of the platforms delays a price update and the impact of the order flow on the quoted prices (inventory and asymmetric information effects). We then investigate the predictions from the theoretical model for the European Bond market with the estimation of a probit model. Our main finding is that the results found in the empirical part corroborate strongly the predictions from the structural model. The event of a cross market arbitrage opportunity has a certain degree of predictability where an optimal ex ante scenario is represented by a low level of spreads on both platforms, a time of the day close to the end of trading hours and a high volume of trade.     

On the test of the globalization of the Japanese equity market under the Kreps-Porteus preference

This paper analyzes empirically the globalization of the Japanese equity market, based on the Kreps-Porteus preference model developed by Epstein (1988) and Epstein and Zin (1990, 1991). Empirical results show that the model performs well. The results are robust to the choice of the combination of assets and instruments. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1994 annual meeting of the Japanese Association of Financial Econometrics and Engineering held at Tsukuba University. The author would like to give thanks to the participants. He also expresses his gratitude to the editor T. Kariya, two anonymous referees and R. Parry for their helpful comments. This research is partly supported by a grant in aid from the Postal Life Insurance Foundation of Japan.     

The impact of hedging on the market value of equity

We examine the annual stock performance of firms that disclose the use of derivatives to hedge over the period 1995 to 1999. We find that only 21.6% of publicly traded U.S. corporations in our sample hedged with derivative instruments over this period and their use is concentrated in the larger companies. Similar to other studies we find that when derivatives are used, interest rate and currency securities are used much more frequently than commodity products. Our sample of 1308 companies that hedge outperforms other securities by 4.3% per year on average over our sample period. This result is robust to several alternative methods of estimating abnormal returns. When we segment performance by the type of hedge used, however, we find that the over-performance is due entirely to larger firms that hedge currency. We find no abnormal returns for firms hedging either interest rates or commodities. The abnormal returns in firms hedging currency is robust to alternative models that seek to control for exchange rate fluctuations and global equity returns; however, we find no significant abnormal returns to currency hedgers when using an augmented model that controls for the role of intangible assets.     

The impact of H-share derivatives on the underlying equity market

We conjecture that an introduction of the Hong Kong Hang Seng Chinese Enterprise Stock Index (H-share Index) futures induces additional speculating activities in the underlying equities, leading to an increase in volatility and volume of the underlying stocks. Whereas, a subsequent introduction of H-share index options increases the level of informed trading and opens up opportunities for speculative and arbitrage activities using futures directly against options. These futures and options trading activities are much cheaper and more efficient than using the underlying stocks, leading to a significant decline in spot market volatility and volume. Our results are consistent with these arguments. We also find that derivative trading does not change the liquidity of H-share constituent stocks. Further tests based on the difference-in-difference approach confirm that the above findings are robust.

Sources of time varying return comovements during different economic regimes: evidence from the emerging Indian equity market

We study the economic and non-economic sources of stock return comovements of the emerging Indian equity market and the developed equity markets of the US, UK, Germany, France, Canada and Japan. Our findings show that the probability of extreme comovements in the economic contraction regime is relatively higher than in the economic expansion regime. We show that international interest rates, inflation uncertainty and dividend yields are the main drivers of the asymmetric return comovements. Findings reported in the paper imply that the impact of interest rates and inflation on return comovements could be used for anticipating financial contagion and/or spillover effects. This is particularly critical since during extreme market conditions, the tail return comovements can potentially reveal critical information for active portfolio management.     

Downside risk in Dow Jones Islamic equity indices: Precious metals and portfolio diversification before and after the COVID-19 bear market

Besides great turmoil in financial markets, the COVID-19 pandemic also disrupted the global supply chain, putting the precious metal market into great uncertainty. In this study, we revisit the diversifying role of precious metals – gold, silver, and platinum – for six Dow Jones Islamic (DJI) equity index portfolios using a battery of tests: dynamic conditional correlations (DCCs), four-moment modified value at risk (VaR) and conditional VaR, and global minimum-variance (GMV) portfolio approach. Our empirical results exhibit drastically increased DCCs between sample assets during the COVID period; however, pairing gold with any of the DJI equity indices (except for the Asia-Pacific region) decreases the downside risk of these portfolios. Other precious metals (silver and platinum) do not provide such benefits. Furthermore, we find that a higher allocation of wealth in DJI Japanese equities and gold is required to achieve a GMV portfolio in the post-COVID-19 era, implying higher transaction (hedging) costs to rebalance portfolios (weights) accordingly. Our out-of-sample tests examining the global financial crisis, European debt crisis, and extended sample (2000–2020) periods yield similar findings as gold glitters across all market conditions. Overall, our findings provide notable practical implications for both domestic and international investors.     

Exploiting social media with higher-order Factorization Machines: statistical arbitrage on high-frequency data of the S&P 500

Over the past 15 years, there have been a number of studies using text mining for predicting stock market data. Two recent publications employed support vector machines and second-order Factorization Machines, respectively, to this end. However, these approaches either completely neglect interactions between the features extracted from the text, or they only account for second-order interactions. In this paper, we apply higher-order Factorization Machines, for which efficient training algorithms have only been available since 2016. As Factorization Machines require hyperparameters to be specified, we also introduce a novel adaptive-order algorithm for automatically determining them. Our study is the first one to make use of social media data for predicting minute-by-minute stock returns, namely the ones of the S&P 500 stock constituents. We show that, unlike a trading strategy employing support vector machines, Factorization-Machine-based strategies attain positive returns after transactions costs for the years 2014 and 2015. Especially the approach applying the adaptive-order algorithm outperforms classical approaches with respect to a multitude of criteria, and it features very favorable characteristics.     

An empirical analysis of the interrelationships among equity markets under changing exchange rate systems

The purpose of this article is to investigate the interrelationships between seven stock markets (Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and U.S.A.) over the period 1969–1976. The impact of flexible exchange rates on the various correlation coefficients is shown to be rather low. The results show a trend towards higher segmentation between the various stock exchanges, which means larger opportunities for international diversification. Finally the relationships between stock index variations and exchange rate fluctuations are analyzed.     

The usefulness of firm risk disclosures under different firm riskiness,investor-interest,and market conditions: New evidence from Finland

To date, there is only meager research evidence on the usefulness of mandatory annual report risk disclosures to investors. Although it has been argued that corporate disclosure decreases information asymmetry between management and shareholders, we do not know whether investors benefit from high-quality risk reporting in a highly regulated risk disclosure environment. In this paper, we performed association tests to examine whether the quality of firms' mandatory risk disclosures relate to information asymmetry in the Finnish stock markets. In addition, we analyzed whether the usefulness of risk disclosures depends on contingency factors such as firm riskiness, investor interest, and market condition. We demonstrate that the quality of risk disclosure has a direct negative influence on information asymmetry. We also document that risk disclosures are more useful if they are provided by small firms, high tech firms, and firms with low analyst coverage. We also found that momentum in stock markets affects the relevance of firms' risk reports.     

The determinants of short selling: evidence from the Hong Kong equity market

While most financial regulators agree that short sellers have an important role to play in ensuring an efficiently functioning market, it is interesting to note that many did not hesitate to ban short selling during the recent financial crisis. This apparent contradiction most likely stems from a lack of understanding about what motivates short trading. In this paper, we focus on the determinants of short selling during ‘normal’ trading in the Hong Kong stock market. We find that dividend payments, company fundamentals, risk, option trading, the interest rate spread and past returns and short selling are all significant determinants of short selling.     

Price discovery in the CDS market: the informational role of equity short interest

This paper documents a negative relation between equity short interest and future returns on credit default swaps (CDS). This relation is most consistent with the theory that equity short interest telegraphs relevant information to secondary market CDS investors about credit spread not transmitted into prices in other ways. The CDS return predictive pattern also strengthens negatively for equity short-interest positions subject to an outward shift in the demand for shortable stocks, which we view as a proxy for the expected benefits of private information (Cohen et al. in J Finance 62(5):2061–2096, 2007). This suggests that features of the shorting market may help explain the lagged response of CDS spreads to equity short interest. Our tests of economic significance, however, do not support the view that the CDS return predictive pattern is strong enough to cover the round-trip cost of trading in the secondary CDS market.     

A study of cointegration and variance decomposition among national equity indices before and during the period of the Asian financial crisis

This study uses a cointegration and variance decomposition analysis to examine the linkages among the stock markets of 12 Asia–Pacific countries, before and during the period of the Asian financial crisis. Johansen (1988) multivariate cointegration and error-correction tests demonstrate evidence in support of the existence of cointegration relationships among the national stock indices during, but not before, the period of financial crises. In the recent crisis, the relationship within the South-East Asian countries seems to be stronger than that within the North-East Asian countries. The variance decomposition reveals that the ‘degree of exogeneity’ for all indices has been reduced, implying that no countries are ‘exogenous’ to the financial crisis. In addition, Granger’s causality test suggests that the US market still ‘causes’ some Asian countries during the period of crisis, reflecting the US market’s persisting dominant role.     

The impact of naked short selling on the securities lending and equity market

This paper examines the impact of naked short selling on equity markets where it is restricted to securities on an approved list. Consistent with Miller's (1977) intuition, stocks with the highest dispersion of opinions and short sale constraints are the only stocks to exhibit significant and negative abnormal returns in the post-event period. We also find slightly higher stock return volatility and a small reduction in liquidity when naked short sales are allowed. Overall, it impairs market quality (liquidity and volatility), although there appears to be some improvement in price efficiency in stocks with high short sale constraints.     

The impact of company responses to exchange queries on the Australian equity market

This study examines the impact of company responses to trading‐induced queries made by the Australian Securities Exchange over the period January 2007–December 2008, inclusive. We utilise event study methodology and a matched sample approach to assess the impact of trading query announcements. We use multivariate analysis to investigate any cross‐sectional determinants affecting abnormal returns and volume, and find significant positive shareholder wealth and volume effects associated with query announcements. Further, the unexplained abnormal returns observed prior to the announcement of the trading query persist post‐announcement. Subsequent analysis reveals the industry effect reported in the literature loses significance after accounting for sample selection bias.