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Journal of Finance Vol. 53 No. 2 1998

Option Volume and Stock Prices: Evidence on Where Informed Traders Trade

David Easley1; Maureen O’Hara2; P.S. Srinivas3

1 Department of Economics, Cornell University · 2 Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University · 3 The World Bank

open access

Abstract

This paper investigates the informational role of transactions volume in options markets. We develop an asymmetric information model in which informed traders may trade in option or equity markets. We show conditions under which informed traders trade options, and we investigate the implications of this for the linkage between markets. Our model predicts an important informational role for the volume of particular types of option trades. We empirically test our model's hypotheses with intraday option data. Our main empirical result is that negative and positive option volumes contain information about future stock prices.

DOI
10.1111/0022-1082.194060
Volume
53
Issue
2
Pages
431-465
Language
en
Sources
crossref openalex

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