Stocks with large increases in call (put) implied volatilities over the previous month tend to have high (low) future returns. Sorting stocks ranked into decile portfolios by past call implied ...volatilities produces spreads in average returns of approximately 1% per month, and the return differences persist up to six months. The cross section of stock returns also predicts option implied volatilities, with stocks with high past returns tending to have call and put option contracts that exhibit increases in implied volatility over the next month, but with decreasing realized volatility. These predictability patterns are consistent with rational models of informed trading.
We present an efficient method for robustly pricing discretely monitored barrier and occupation time derivatives under exponential Lévy models. This includes ordinary barrier options, as well as ...(resetting) Parisian options, delayed barrier options (also known as cumulative Parisian or Parasian options), fader options and step options (soft-barriers), all with single and double barriers, which have yet to be priced with more general Lévy processes, including KoBoL (CGMY), Merton's jump diffusion and NIG. The method's efficiency is derived in part from the use of frame-projected transition densities, which transform the problem into the Fourier domain and accelerate the convergence of intermediate expectations. Moreover, these expectations are approximated by Toeplitz matrix-vector multiplications, resulting in a fast implementation. We devise an augmentation approach that contributes to the method's robustness, adding protection against mis-specifying a proper truncation support of the transition density. Theoretical convergence is verified by a series of numerical experiments which demonstrate the method's efficiency and accuracy.
Corporate managers who face both strategic uncertainty and market uncertainty confront a classic trade-off between commitment and flexibility. They can stake a claim by making a large capital ...investment today, influencing their rivals' behavior; or they can take a "wait and see" approach to avoid adverse market consequences tomorrow. In Competitive Strategy, Benoit Chevalier-Roignant and Lenos Trigeorgis describe an emerging paradigm that can quantify and balance commitment and flexibility, "option games," by which the decision-making approaches of real options and game theory can be combined. The authors first discuss prerequisite concepts and tools from basic game theory, industrial organization, and real options analysis, bringing important materials and ideas together into a unified framework. They then present the new approach in discrete time and later in continuous time, beginning with the building blocks of the basic ideas and tools and culminating in richer theoretical analyses. Their presentation of continuous-time option games is the first systematic coverage of the topic and fills a significant gap in the existing literature. Competitive Strategy provides a rigorous yet pragmatic and intuitive approach to strategy formulation. It synthesizes research in the areas of strategy, economics, and finance in a way that is accessible to readers not necessarily expert in the various fields involved. The book will be of interest to scholars, students, and academically trained practicing managers interested in applying these ideas.
The shape of the volatility smirk has significant cross-sectional predictive power for future equity returns. Stocks exhibiting the steepest smirks in their traded options underperform stocks with ...the least pronounced volatility smirks in their options by 10.9% per year on a risk-adjusted basis. This predictability persists for at least 6 months, and firms with the steepest volatility smirks are those experiencing the worst earnings shocks in the following quarter. The results are consistent with the notion that informed traders with negative news prefer to trade out-of-the-money put options, and that the equity market is slow in incorporating the information embedded in volatility smirks.
Recent evidence shows that option volatility skews and volatility spreads between call and put options predict equity returns. This study investigates whether such predictive ability is driven by ...option traders' information advantage.We examine the predictive ability of volatility skews and volatility spreads around significant information events including earnings announcements, other firm-specific information events, and events that trigger significant market reactions. Consistent with option traders having an information advantage relative to equity traders before information events, we find that the option measures immediately before these events have higher predictive ability for short-term event returns than they do in a more dated window or before a randomly selected pseudo-event. We also find that option measures have predictive ability after information events. However, this predictive ability holds only for unscheduled corporate announcements, which suggests that, relative to equity traders, option traders have superior ability to process less anticipated information.
This paper investigates informed trading on stock volatility in the option market. We construct non-market maker net demand for volatility from the trading volume of individual equity options and ...find that this demand is informative about the future realized volatility of underlying stocks. We also find that the impact of volatility demand on option prices is positive. More importantly, the price impact increases by 40% as informational asymmetry about stock volatility intensifies in the days leading up to earnings announcements and diminishes to its normal level soon after the volatility uncertainty is resolved.
Expected Option Returns Coval, Joshua D.; Shumway, Tyler
The Journal of finance (New York),
June 2001, Volume:
56, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper examines expected option returns in the context of mainstream asset-pricing theory. Under mild assumptions, expected call returns exceed those of the underlying security and increase with ...the strike price. Likewise, expected put returns are below the risk-free rate and increase with the strike price. S&P index option returns consistently exhibit these characteristics. Under stronger assumptions, expected option returns vary linearly with option betas. However, zero-beta, at-the-money straddle positions produce average losses of approximately three percent per week. This suggests that some additional factor, such as systematic stochastic volatility, is priced in option returns.
Early Exercise of Put Options on Stocks BARRACLOUGH, KATHRYN; WHALEY, ROBERT E.
The Journal of finance (New York),
08/2012, Volume:
67, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
U.S. exchange-traded stock options are exercisable before expiration. While put options should frequently be exercised early to earn interest, they are not. In this paper, we derive an early exercise ...decision rule and then examine actual exercise behavior during the period January 1996 through September 2008. We find that more than 3.96 million puts that should have been exercised early remain unexercised, representing over 3.7% of all outstanding puts. We also find that failure to exercise cost put option holders $1.9 billion in forgone interest income and that this interest is systematically captured by market makers and proprietary firms.
We provide empirical evidence on the positive effect of non-executive employee stock options on corporate innovation. The positive effect is more pronounced when employees are more important for ...innovation, when free-riding among employees is weaker, when options are granted broadly to most employees, when the average expiration period of options is longer, and when employee stock ownership is lower. Further analysis reveals that employee stock options foster innovation mainly through the risk-taking incentive, rather than the performance-based incentive created by stock options.
•This paper develops a general methodology for modeling and pricing financial derivatives which depend on systems of stochastic diffusion processes.•Weak convergence of the approximation is ...demonstrated, with second order convergence in space.•Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method for various European and early-exercise options in two and three dimensions
Continuous time Markov Chain (CTMC) approximation techniques have received increasing attention in the option pricing literature, due to their ability to solve complex pricing problems, although existing approaches are mostly limited to one or two dimensions. This paper develops a general methodology for modeling and pricing financial derivatives which depend on systems of stochastic diffusion processes. This is accomplished with a general decorrelation procedure, which reduces the system of correlated diffusions to an uncorrelated system. This enables simple and efficient approximation of the driving processes by univariate CTMC approximations. Weak convergence of the approximation is demonstrated, with second order convergence in space. Numerical experiments demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method for various European and early-exercise options in two and three dimensions.
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