Short-Term Price Overreaction: Identification, Testing, Exploitation

This paper examines short-term price reactions after one-day abnormal price changes and whether they create exploitable profit opportunities in various financial markets. A t-test confirms the presence of overreactions and also suggests that there is an "inertia anomaly", i.e. after an overreaction day prices tend to move in the same direction for some time. A trading robot approach is then used to test two trading strategies aimed at exploiting the detected anomalies to make abnormal profits. The results suggest that a strategy based on counter-movements after overreactions does not generate profits in the FOREX and the commodity markets, but it is profitable in the case of the US stock market. By contrast, a strategy exploiting the "inertia anomaly" produces profits in the case of the FOREX and the commodity markets, but not in the case of the US stock market

Foreign exchange, fractional cointegration and the implied-realized volatility relation

Almost all relevant literature has characterized implied volatility as a biased predictor of realized volatility. This paper provides new time series techniques to assess the validity of this finding within a foreign exchange market context. We begin with the empirical observation that the fractional order of volatility is often found to have confidence intervals that span the stationary/non-stationary boundary. However, no existing fractional cointegration test has been shown to be robust to both regions. Therefore, a new test for fractional cointegration is developed and shown to be robust to the relevant orders of integration. Secondly, employing a dataset that includes the relatively new Euro markets, it is shown that implied and realized volatility are fractionally cointegrated with a slope coefficient of unity. Moreover, the non-standard asymptotic distribution of estimators when using fractionally integrated data is overcome by employing a bootstrap procedure in the frequency domain. Strikingly, tests then show that implied volatility is an unbiased predictor of realized volatility

A behavioural approach to the pricing of European options

Empirical studies on quoted options highlight deviations from the theoretical model of Black and Scholes; this is due to different causes, such as assumptions regarding the price dynamics, markets frictions and investors’ attitude toward risk. In this contribution, we focus on this latter issue and study how to value options within the continuous cumulative prospect theory. According to prospect theory, individuals do not always take their decisions consistently with the maximization of expected utility. Decision makers have biased probability estimates; they tend to underweight high probabilities and overweight low probabilities. Risk attitude, loss aversion and subjective probabilities are described by two functions: a value function and a weighting function, respectively. As in Versluis et al. [15], we evaluate European options; we consider the pricing problem both from the writer’s and holder’s perspective, and extend the model to the put option. We also use alternative probability weighting functions

Effects of taxation for option writers: an Australian perspective

Writing an option is a taxable event for Australian investors. This method of taxation penalizes investors who hold open short option positions over the tax year end by accelerating their tax liability relative to the timing of the economic gain from writing options. This paper examines the levels of open interest in the Australian Stock Exchange over the change in financial year to determine whether investors time their transactions to avoid this tax acceleration. The results show that level of open interest is lower in the last month of the financial year after controlling for non-tax determinants of option demand. Copyright (c) The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2007 AFAANZ.