We investigate whether transaction costs, arbitrage risk, and short-sale impediments explain the abnormal returns of volatility-managed equity portfolios. Even using six cost-mitigation strategies, after transaction costs, volatility management of asset-pricing factors besides the market return generally produces zero abnormal returns and significantly reduces Sharpe ratios. In contrast, abnormal returns of the volatility-managed market portfolio are robust to transaction costs and concentrated in the most easily arbitraged stocks, those with low arbitrage risk and impediments to short selling. Moreover, the managed market strategy only provides superior performance when sentiment is high, consistent with prior theory that sentiment traders underreact to volatility

On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced a largely unexpected domination plan for Volkswagen. The resulting short squeeze in Volkswagen’s stock briefly made it the most valuable listed company in the world. We argue that this was a manipulation designed to save Porsche from insolvency and the German laws against this kind of abuse were not effectively enforced. Using hand-collected data we provide the first rigorous academic study of the Porsche-VW squeeze and show that it significantly impeded market efficiency. Preventing manipulation is important because without efficient securities markets, the EU’s major project of the Capital Markets Union cannot be successful.

We study the cross-section of returns on FX options sorting currencies based on implied volatilities (IVs). Long straddle positions in currencies with low (high) IVs perform well (poorly). A long low IV-short high IV strategy produces large average returns after transaction costs. Total volatility matters rather than any component or transformation of volatility. The returns are distinct from those in the literature on foreign exchange returns or equity option returns and cannot be explained convincingly by standard risk factors. We argue cross-sectional differences in hedging demand combined with limits to arbitrage contribute to mispricing in FX options

We present evidence on the asset pricing implications of salience theory. In our model, investors overweight salient past returns when forming expectations about future returns. Consequently, investors are attracted to stocks with salient upsides, which are overvalued and earn low subsequent returns. Conversely, stocks with salient downsides are undervalued and yield high future returns. We find empirical support for these predictions in the cross section of US stocks. The salience effect is stronger among stocks with greater limits to arbitrage and during high-sentiment periods. Our results are not explained by common risk factors, return reversals, lottery demand, and attention-grabbing news events

Motivated by the theory of demand-based option pricing in imperfect markets, we examine the relation between short-sale constraints and equity option returns, conditional on the level of mispricing in the underlying stock. We report a monotonic relation between various measures of short-sale constraints and delta-hedged returns of put options on overpriced stocks. This relation is robust to controls for firm attributes and limits to arbitrage proxies. Our findings suggest that while investors drive up the demand for these put options, dealers command a high premium as compensation for the increased market making risk. We do not find a robust relation for either put options on underpriced stocks or call options