We find that the market’s recent cross-sectional dispersion in stock returns is positively related to the subsequent value book-to-market premium and negatively related to the subsequent momentum premium. The partial relation between return dispersion (RD) and the subsequent value and momentum premiums remains strong when controlling for macroeconomic state variables suggested by the literature. Our findings are consistent with recent theoretical insights and empirical evidence that suggest that the market’s RD may serve as a leading countercyclical state variable, that the value premium is countercyclical, and that the momentum premium is procyclical.

For S&P 100 stocks, we find that the weekly returns over option-expiration (OE) weeks (a month’s third-Friday week) tend to be high, relative to: (1) the third-Friday weekly returns of other stocks with less option activity, (2) the own stock’s other weekly returns, (3) the risk, based on asset-pricing alphas. For these same stocks, a month’s fourth-Friday weekly returns underperform modestly. We suggest the following two avenues are likely partial contributors towards understanding these return patterns: (1) delta-hedge rebalancing by option market makers, with a reduction in short-stock hedge positions over the OE week, and (2) declining risk perceptions over the OE week, as measured by option-derived implied volatilities. Our findings suggest option activity can induce reliable patterns in the weekly returns of option-active large-cap stocks.

We examine whether time variation in the comovements of daily stock and Treasury bond returns can be linked to measures of stock market uncertainty, specifically the implied volatility from equity index options and detrended stock turnover. From a forward-looking perspective, we find a negative relation between the uncertainty measures and the future correlation of stock and bond returns. Contemporaneously, we find that bond returns tend to be high (low) relative to stock returns during days when implied volatility increases (decreases) substantially and during days when stock turnover is unexpectedly high (low). Our findings suggest that stock market uncertainty has important cross-market pricing in-fluences and that stock-bond diversification benefits increase with stock market uncertainty.

We explore the predictive relation between high-frequency investor sentiment and stock market returns. Our results are based on a proprietary dataset of high-frequency investor sentiment, which is computed based on a comprehensive textual analysis of sources from news wires, internet news sources, and social media. We find substantial evidence that intraday S&P 500 index returns are predictable using lagged half-hour investor sentiment. The predictive power is also found in other stock and bond index ETFs. We document that this sentiment effect is independent of the intraday momentum effect, which is based on lagged half-hour returns. While the intraday momentum effect only exists in the last half hour, the sentiment effect persists in at least the last two hours of a trading day. From an investment perspective, high-frequency investor sentiment also appears to have significant economic value when evaluated with market timing trading strategies. We find evidence that the return predictability is most likely driven by the trading activities of noise traders.