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We investigate the impact of information trading on predicting variation of implied volatility. First, we find that informed traders do trade in the index options market. The predicting biases of implied volatilities on the realized volatility are correlated with the information trading. Second, we find that delta market depth and bid-ask spread are correlated with the predicting variations in implied volatilities. Moreover, the difference between realized and implied volatility, bid-ask spread, and delta market depth are the determinants of price discovery in the option market. Third, the intraday patterns in realized volatility exhibit an inverse J-shape, which induces forecasting biases in implied volatilities. Finally, based on the performance of the volatility trading strategy, the result does not support efficient market hypothesis.
Despite a growing research interest in option trading and its impact on the pricing of the underlying asset, the role of options as a vehicle for informed trading remains an important economic question which has not yet been fully explored. In fact, even though academics have often argued that informed traders may prefer to trade in the option market rather than the equity market1, the question of whether (and to what extent) such a proposition would hold in practice has not been systematically addressed in the literature. This overarching research problem forms the foundation of this doctoral research project, leading to two important research questions. First, if investors do in fact use options to trade on information about underlying stock prices in practice, what implications does this have for the option (stock) pricing and forecasting? Second, what are the key factors driving traders' decisions to trade on new information in one market over another? These two issues correspond to the two gaps found in the extant literature on option trading, and also in the strand of empirical studies focusing on the role of options as a mechanism for trading on information about the underlying asset. To explore these research questions, three interrelated projects have been undertaken, each with a unique contribution to informing the research topic. These closely related investigations jointly provide consolidated answers to the two research questions raised previously. In response to the first research question, we pursue two strands of empirical investigation to examine the presence of informed trading in the option market. Firstly, we investigate the extent to which the information content extracted from options trading can be used to enhance predictions of the future volatility realised by underlying stocks. Secondly, we examine the price impact of information trading activities within the option market, focusing especially on the way in which the level of trading activities can explain and predict the future dynamics of the option implied volatility smile. Both of these strands yield evidence in support of information trading activities existing in the option market. Regarding the second research question, our collective evidence indicates that the allocation of informed traders between option and stock markets depends on the trade-off of transaction costs and trading opportunities existing in two related markets. This finding has consistently been corroborated by separate evidence emerging from our independent investigations. We found that the degree of information trading in the option market varies across different stocks, corresponding to variations in the level of individual stock liquidity. It has also been found that the degree of information asymmetry of option trades changed in response to changes in trading costs driven by regulatory changes observed during the 2008 short-sale ban. This research makes a valuable contribution to the field of option research. From the theoretical perspective, it addresses significant gaps in the existing literature and extends our understanding of informed trading activities in the option market. In particular, it contributes to the body of knowledge on the economic value of derivatives by investigating the critical role they have played in the process of incorporating new information into the market. From the practical perspective, it proposes a simple-yet-effective technique which employs trading volume to improve forecasts of the underlying stock volatility and of the option implied volatility (price) respectively. Since volatility plays such a central role in the practice of derivatives trading, risk analysis and portfolio management, better forecasts of these quantities are clearly important and highly regarded by practitioners. 1 Mainly due to higher financial leverages, reduced transactions costs and wider trading opportunities (eg speculation on volatility) (Black, 1975).
"In this paper, I present evidence that informed traders represent a large enough portion of option market activity to impact market prices. By entering the market on the long side before positive or negative events, they drive up both open interest and ask prices, while bid prices remain relatively stable. Seeing this pattern is indicative of either positive (when found in calls) or negative (for puts) future news announcements. When conditioning on these announcements, we also see that this pattern predicts return reactions. In particular, information embedded in option prices is useful in predicting earnings surprises and reactions to mergers. My primary measure of option information content is the change in the difference between implied volatility and realized daily volatility measured over the previous month. With hindsight, this difference rises prior to positive announcements for call options, while it rises prior to negative announcements for put options. This differential behavior provides strong evidence that these assets are not redundant in practice, as is often implied by option pricing models. Further, this information constitutes a primary risk factor in equity markets, as positive announcement risk is positively related to future returns due to the procyclicality of these announcements. Efficiently utilizing this information suggests a long-short trading strategy that yields over 1.2 percent per month. This strategy also completely explains the call-put volatility spread anomaly and is robust to controls for aggregate volatility sensitivity and known metrics that purport to monitor informed trading"--Page v.
The objective of this thesis is to examine the information content of stock options in financial markets. A key question in financial economics is how information diffuses across markets and how quickly it is reflected in security prices. This thesis aims at exploring this question by investigating the informational role that options play in financial markets. This is achieved by exploring the joint cross section of option and bond prices, the informational role of options in seasoned equity offerings (SEOs), and the information content of options trading prior to announcements of changes to the S&P 500 Index.The thesis comprises three essays, each exploring the information content of equity options trading from a different angle. The first essay examines the joint cross section of option implied volatility and corporate bond returns. Theoretical and empirical work in finance suggests that stocks and bonds of the same issuing firm should share common risk factors. Therefore, new information about a firm should affect both its stock and bond prices. However, if one market offers trading incentives over other markets, informed traders and traders with better ability to process information may choose to trade in that market over the others. As a result, markets that provide advantages to informed traders will incorporate information prior to other markets. The empirical analysis in this chapter reveals that options trading is strongly predictive of corporate bond returns. A strategy of buying (selling) the portfolio with the lowest (highest) changes in option implied volatility yields an average monthly excess bond return of 1.03%. This strategy is statistically highly significant and economically very meaningful and indicates that information is incorporated into option prices prior to bond prices. In contrast, I find no evidence that bond prices incorporate information prior to option or stock prices. Since bond investors are generally sophisticated institutional investors who process information efficiently and the predictive ability of options is persistent, I conclude that informed trading rather than superior information processing abilities is responsible for the predictive ability of options.The second essay explores the information content of option implied volatility around the announcements and issue dates of SEOs. The literature on SEOs indicates that announcements and issue dates contain important information about firms and therefore provide profitable opportunities for traders with private information. While prior research has focused on the information content of short sales around SEOs, this study focuses on the information content of options which can act as an alternative for short selling. The empirical analysis provides evidence of informed trading in the options market around SEO announcements. Around SEO issue dates, I find that higher demand for put options is significantly related to larger issue discounts which is consistent with the manipulative trading hypothesis. The results in this study indicate that regulators should consider extending the short-sale restrictions of Rule 105 to restrict trading in related securities.Finally, the third essay investigates the information content of options prior to the S&P 500 Index inclusion and exclusion announcements. These announcements are unique events since they are not announced by the firm and, as stated by S&P, they should convey no new information. In addition, the large abnormal returns observed following these announcements make them distinctive ground for testing the informational role of options. Consistent with the notion that informed traders operate in the options market, the empirical results in this essay indicate that there is a significant relationship between options trading preceding index inclusion announcements and abnormal returns following these announcements. In contrast, I find no evidence for a relationship between options trading and abnormal returns following exclusion announcements.
This paper investigates informed trading on stock volatility in the option market. Using a unique data set from the Chicago Board Options Exchange, we construct non-market maker net demand for stock volatility from the trading volume of individual equity options. We find that this volatility demand is informative about the future realized volatility of underlying stocks which suggests the presence of volatility information traders in the option market. We also examine asset pricing implications of volatility information trading by measuring Kyle's lambda: The impact on option prices for each unit increase in volatility demand. The price impact is positive which is consistent with the existence of informational asymmetry about stock volatility. More importantly, we link the time variation in the price impact to the time variation in the degree of informational asymmetry. In particular, the price impact increases by over 50 percent 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.
This study follows the approach of Ni, Pan and Poteshman (2008) ndash; based upon the vega-weighted net demand for volatility ndash; to determine whether volatility information exists within the Taiwan options market. Our empirical results show that foreign institutional investors possess the strongest and most direct volatility information, which is realized by the delta-neutral options/futures trades. In addition, a few individual investors (less than 1% of individuals' trades) might be informed and realize their volatility information using the strangle strategy. Surprisingly, we find no evidence to support the predictive ability of the volatility demand from straddle trades, despite the widespread acknowledgement that such trades are sensitive to volatility.
Abstract: Black and Scholes (1973) implied volatilities tend to be systematically related to the option's exercise price and time to expiration. Derman and Kani (1994), Dupire (1994), and Rubinstein (1994) attribute this behavior to the fact that the Black-Scholes constant volatility assumption is violated in practice. These authors hypothesize that the volatility of the underlying asset's return is a deterministic function of the asset price and time and develop the deterministic volatility function (DVF) option valuation model, which has the potential of fitting the observed cross-section of option prices exactly. Using a sample of S & P 500 index options during the period June 1988 through December 1993, we evaluate the economic significance of the implied deterministic volatility function by examining the predictive and hedging performance of the DV option valuation model. We find that its performance is worse than that of an ad hoc Black-Scholes model with variable implied volatilities.
This dissertation consists of three essays that explore the information content embedded in equity options. The results improve our understanding of the cross-section of option returns, informed trading in the options market, and the industry effect of IPOs. In the first essay, we study the relation between option-implied skewness (IS) and the crosssection of option returns under daily hedging to better understand skewness pricing in isolation from lower moments. Creating portfolios of delta-hedged (D-hedged) and delta-vega-hedged (DV-hedged) options with daily rebalancing, we find that IS is negatively (positively) related to call (put) option returns, but the relation to put options is statistically significant only during economic recessions. The relation is more substantial when the underlying stock has a larger market beta and when the firm has more severe information opacity. Our results suggest that investors' skewness preference grows stronger with greater market risk and lower information quality. In the second essay, we examined the informed trading in the options market before FDA drug advisory committee meetings. We find significant abnormal options trading volume before both meeting dates and report creation dates, particularly for small drug firms. Abnormal volume significantly predicts post-meeting stock returns. Informed traders prefer out-of-the-money options and choose maturities to cover the dates when reports are publicly released. They prefer to sell options close to the meeting date, perhaps to capture returns from both expected stock price changes and the sharp drop in implied volatility post-meeting. In the third essay, I investigate the effect of initial public offerings (IPOs) on industry competitors' options market. I find that rival firms' put (call) options volume increases (decreases) around IPOs, leading to price pressure on call options relative to put options as measured by the implied volatility spread. Rival firms' reaction in the options market also predicts the IPO firms' post-IPO stock performance. Lastly, rival firms with strong operating income experience less negative impact in the options market, suggesting competitive operation performance help stabilize rival firms' options market around IPOs.