Put-call parity revisited: intradaily tests in the foreign currency options market

We test exchange-traded (PHLX) German mark options for conformance to put-call parity (PCP). Puts and calls are matched to the nearest minute, and the relative impact of competing spot exchange rate sources (Reuters vs. Telerate) is assessed. We find that PCP usually holds (roughly 96% of put-call pairs), with the exception of a notable incident in the European options pits. In those instances in which PCP is violated, we find sharp intradaily and intraweekly seasonalities for American options, with disproportionate PCP violations occurring during the relatively light trading periods in early evening and on Fridays. We also conclude that the Telerate prices as recorded by the PHLX are not as accurate as the Reuters exchange rates provided by Olsen and Associates, probably because of time lags in the Telerate data.     

Speculative attacks: A laboratory study in continuous time

We examine speculative attacks in a controlled laboratory environment featuring continuous time, size asymmetries, and varying amounts of public information. Attacks succeeded in 233 of 344 possible cases. When speculators have symmetric size and access to information: (a) weaker fundamentals increase the likelihood of successful speculative attacks and hasten their onset, and (b) contrary to some theory, success is enhanced by public access to information about either the net speculative position or the fundamentals. The presence of a larger speculator further enhances success, and experience with large speculators increases small speculators' response to the public information. However, giving the large speculator increased size or better information does not significantly strengthen his impact.     

A change in market microstructure: the switch to electronic screen trading on the New Zealand stock exchange

The New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZSE) switched from open outcry trading to an electronic screen trading system on June 24, 1991. The change was made by the members of the exchange to improve the trading system and to reduce costs. This paper investigates empirically whether improvement was achieved through a reduction in transaction costs. The tests and results focus on order-flow migration to the exchange from alternative execution locations and changes in bid-ask spreads. On balance, we conclude that transaction costs have declined.     

Speculative trading and stock returns: A stochastic dominance analysis of the Chinese A-share market

The pricing of A-shares in China has long puzzled financial economists. This paper applies recent tests of stochastic dominance (SD) to examine whether differences in the return distributions of A- and B-shares in China are consistent with market efficiency. As SD is nonparametric, market efficiency can be examined without the joint test problem arising from misspecifications in the asset pricing benchmark. Our results show A-shares have second-order dominated B-shares from 1996 to 2005. This dominance was most significant during the market segmentation period, but has continued, albeit to a lesser extent even after the B-share market was opened to local investors in 2001. Our results are robust to using residual returns from an international asset pricing model instead of raw returns. We conclude that the superior performance of A-shares cannot be attributed to risk. The results are more likely due to a return bias caused by intense speculation among retail individuals under limited arbitrage.     

Real-time market microstructure analysis: online transaction cost analysis

Motivated by the practical challenge in monitoring the performance of a large number of algorithmic trading orders, this paper provides a methodology that leads to automatic discovery of causes that lie behind poor trading performance. It also gives theoretical foundations to a generic framework for real-time trading analysis. The common acronym for investigating the causes of bad and good performance of trading is transaction cost analysis Rosenthal [Performance Metrics for Algorithmic Traders, 2009]). Automated algorithms take care of most of the traded flows on electronic markets (more than 70% in the US, 45% in Europe and 35% in Japan in 2012). Academic literature provides different ways to formalize these algorithms and show how optimal they can be from a mean-variance (like in Almgren and Chriss [J. Risk, 2000, 3(2), 5–39]), a stochastic control (e.g. Guéant et al. [Math. Financ. Econ., 2013, 7(4), 477–507]), an impulse control (see Bouchard et al. [SIAM J. Financ. Math., 2011, 2(1), 404–438]) or a statistical learning (as used in Laruelle et al. [Math. Financ. Econ., 2013, 7(3), 359–403]) viewpoint. This paper is agnostic about the way the algorithm has been built and provides a theoretical formalism to identify in real-time the market conditions that influenced its efficiency or inefficiency. For a given set of characteristics describing the market context, selected by a practitioner, we first show how a set of additional derived explanatory factors, called anomaly detectors, can be created for each market order (following for instance Cristianini and Shawe-Taylor [An Introduction to Support Vector Machines and Other Kernel-based Learning Methods, 2000]). We then will present an online methodology to quantify how this extended set of factors, at any given time, predicts (i.e. have influence, in the sense of predictive power or information defined in Basseville and Nikiforov [Detection of Abrupt Changes: Theory and Application, 1993], Shannon [Bell Syst. Tech. J., 1948, 27, 379–423] and Alkoot and Kittler [Pattern Recogn. Lett., 1999, 20(11), 1361–1369]) which of the orders are underperforming while calculating the predictive power of this explanatory factor set. Armed with this information, which we call influence analysis, we intend to empower the order monitoring user to take appropriate action on any affected orders by re-calibrating the trading algorithms working the order through new parameters, pausing their execution or taking over more direct trading control. Also we intend that use of this method can be taken advantage of to automatically adjust their trading action in the post trade analysis of algorithms.     

Market microstructure: A review from down under

The early automation of the Australian and New Zealand financial markets provided researchers with access to high‐frequency data to undertake extensive empirical market microstructure research. We use this anniversary edition of Accounting and Finance to review some of this research and to discuss the development of the Australian and New Zealand markets since their automation. We identify issues currently facing the markets and highlight potential areas for future research. The paper also provides a review of market microstructure theory on inventory control models and asymmetric information models.     

A market model with medium/long-term effects due to an insider

In this article, we consider a modification of the Karatzas–Pikovsky model of insider trading. Specifically, we suppose that the insider agent influences the long/medium-term evolution of Black–Scholes type model through the drift of the stochastic differential equation. We say that the insider agent is using a portfolio leading to a partial equilibrium if the following three properties are satisfied: (a) the portfolio used by the insider leads to a stock price which is a semimartingale under his/her own filtration and his/her own filtration enlarged with the final price; (b) the portfolio used by the insider is optimal in the sense that it maximises the logarithmic utility for the insider when his/her filtration is fixed; and (c) the optimal logarithmic utility in (b) is finite. We give sufficient conditions for the existence of a partial equilibrium and show in some explicit models how to apply these general results.     

Why do Japanese giant trading companies prefer foreign currency to Japanese yen?: A supplementary note

This note extends the Chen and Chiang (1992) analysis to examine the possibility that trades may be denominated in the currency of the third country. Two main conclusions are found in this note. First, the quantities of trade and employment are still invariant to invoicing strategies chosen. Second, the currency of the trading partner may not be chosen by the monopolistic trader.     

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.     

Strategic Early Warning System for the French milk market: A graph theoretical approach to foresee volatility

This paper presents a new approach for developing a Strategic Early Warning System aiming to better detect and interpret weak signals. We chose the milk market as a case study, in line with the recent call from the EU Commission for governance tools which help to better address such highly volatile markets. Furthermore, on the first of April 2015, the new Common Agricultural Policy ended quotas for milk, which led to a milk crisis in the EU. Thus, we collaborated with milk experts to get their inputs for a new model to analyse the competitive environment. Consequently, we constructed graphs to represent the major factors that affect the milk industry and the relationships between them. We obtained several network measures for this social network, such as centrality and density. Some factors appear to have the largest major influence on all the other graph elements, while others strongly interact in cliques. Any detected changes in any of these factors will automatically impact the others. Therefore, scanning ones competitive environment can allow an organisation to get an early warning to help it avoid an issue (as much as possible) and/or seize an opportunity before its competitors. We conclude that Strategic Early Warning Systems as a corporate foresight approach utilising graph theory can strengthen the governance of markets.     

From the bird's eye to the microscope: A survey of new stylized facts of the intra-daily foreign exchange markets

This paper presents stylized facts concerning the spot intra-daily foreign exchange markets. It first describes intra-daily data and proposes a set of definitions for the variables of interest. Empirical regularities of the foreign exchange intra-daily data are then grouped under three major topics: the distribution of price changes, the process of price formation and the heterogeneous structure of the market. The stylized facts surveyed in this paper shed new light on the market structure that appears composed of heterogeneous agents. It also poses several challenges such as the definition of price and of the time-scale, the concepts of risk and efficiency, the modeling of the markets and the learning process.