We estimate the stock’s likelihood of extreme returns by measuring the extent to which the stock’s trades are correlated with market-wide and industry-wide trades during normal times, referred to as herding. We find that stocks whose trades herd most with aggregate-level trades experience most negative (positive) returns during market crashes (booms). While herding generates extreme returns in both sides, investors appear to demand compensation for the possibility of extreme low returns. This is the case even when we control for standard asset pricing variables and other tail risk proxies.

This paper investigates the efficiency of the market for stock index futures and the profitability of index arbitrage for The Chicago Board of Trade's Major Market Index contracts. The spot value of the index is computed with transactions prices for the component shares of the index obtained from the Fitch database. The tests account for transaction costs, execution lags, and the uptick rule for short sales of stocks. Results indicate that the size and frequency of boundary violations are substantially smaller than those reported by earlier studies and have declined sharply with time.

Kalok Chan, Y. Peter Chung, Herb Johnson, The Intraday Behavior of Bid-Ask Spreads for NYSE Stocks and CBOE Options, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Sep., 1995), pp. 329-346

This article analyzes the intraday interdependence of order flows and price movements for actively traded NYSE stocks and their Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE)-traded options. Stock net trade volume (buyer-initiated volume minus seller-initiated volume) has strong predictive ability for stock and option quote revisions, but option net trade volume has no incremental predictive ability. This suggests that informed investors initiate trades in the stock market but not in the option market. On the other hand, both stock and option quote revisions have predictive ability for each other. Thus, while information in the stock market is contained in both quote revisions and trades, information in the option market is contained only in quote revisions.

We study the impact of exchange rate fluctuations and political risk on the risk premiums reflected in cross-sections of individual equity returns from Mexico, a country that has ex? perienced significant monetary and political turbulence. Indicators from Mexico's currency and sovereign debt markets are employed as proxies for exchange rate and political risks. We find some evidence of equity market premiums for exposure to these risks. The results suggest common factors in emerging market equity, currency, and sovereign debt markets, and have several implications for corporate and portfolio management and for the use of emerging market data by researchers.

We study the intraday impact of exchange rate news on emerging market American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and closed‐end country funds during the 1994 Mexican peso crisis. Peso exchange‐rate changes affect prices and trading volumes of Latin American equities, and some closed‐end fund behavior is consistent with “noise trader” theories of small investors. However, there is no evidence that peso depreciation triggers a significant sell‐off of non‐Mexican securities or that other non‐Mexican trading patterns change at times of high peso news flow. Thus, the “Tequila Effect” is largely confined to price changes.

While many studies find that option prices lead stock prices, Stephan and Whaley (1990) find that stocks lead options. We find no evidence that options, even deep out‐of‐the‐money options, lead stocks. After confirming Stephan and Whaley's results, we show their results can be explained as spurious leads induced by infrequent trading of options. We show that the stock lead disappears when the average of the bid and ask prices is used instead of transaction prices. Hence, we find no evidence of arbitrage opportunities associated with the stock lead.