An exercise boundary violation (EBV) occurs when the current bid price for an American option in the market is below intrinsic value. A seller at this price leaves money on the table and the buyer receives an arbitrage profit. In a liquid market, competition among dealers should drive up the bid...

Do option investors rationally exercise their options? Numerous studies report evidence of irrational behavior. In this paper, we pay careful attention to intraday option quotes and reach the opposite conclusion. An exercise boundary violation (EBV) occurs when the best bid price for an American...

The Federal Reserve announces its new interest rate target while the stock market is open, at precisely 2:15 P.M. eight times a year. In the Efficient Markets model, information is impounded in prices immediately and accurately as soon as it becomes public knowledge and only the unanticipated...

A risk-neutral probability distribution (RND) for future S&P 500 returns extracted from index options contains investors' true expectations and also their risk preferences. But the empirical pricing kernel that emerges in a representative agent framework, which suppresses investor differences,...

In over 40 years teaching finance, I have put together hundreds of PowerPoint slides for MBA and Undergraduate level courses on Futures, Options, Derivatives and related topics. I provide them here for download and use without restriction, with the caveat that while I have done my best to make...

We analyse the dynamic behavior of conditional volatility in commodity markets using a novel, manually collected dataset of daily price ranges over a time span of more than 140 years, which allows more precise daily volatility estimates than are otherwise prevalent in the commodity literature....

Theory says an American call should never be exercised early, except possibly just before an ex-dividend date. But the best market bid is frequently below intrinsic value for an in-the-money short maturity option. An American option can always be exercised to recover intrinsic value, while...