The FTSE/ASE-20 futures market, as the first organised Greek derivatives market, established in August 1999 and its operation rests with the Athens Derivatives Exchange (ADEX) and the Athens Derivatives Exchange Clearing House (ADECH). Cointegration tests are used and an error correction model...

Ratios that indicate the statistical significance of a fund’s alpha typically appraise its performance. A growing literature suggests that even in the absence of any ability to predict returns, holding options positions on the benchmark assets or trading frequently can significantly enhance...

Over the last two decades, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the rate-setting body of the United States Federal Reserve System, has become increasingly communicative and transparent. According to policymakers, one of the goals of this shift has been to improve monetary policy...

We show that nearly 100 percent of the U.S. equity premium is earned over a window around the opening hours of European markets when U.S. cash markets are closed. We explore two potential complementary explanations. First, consistent with predictions from dealer inventory risk models, we find...

The European Union Emissions Trading Scheme is the key policy instrument of the European Commission's Climate Change Program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 8% below 1990 levels by 2012. The key asset traded under the scheme is the European Union allowance (EUA). This article...

We use the daily data of 16 commodity futures contracts traded in China and corresponding foreign markets (the US, the UK, Japan, and Malaysia) to analyze the linkages between markets. Several findings are noteworthy. First, trading returns of foreign markets, such as the US, have significant...

The distributional form of financial asset returns has important implications for the theoretical and empirical analyses in economics and finance. It is now a well-established fact that financial return distributions are empirically nonstationary, both in the weak and the strong sense. One first...

This paper studies the effect of stock options expiration day on the underlying shares traded on the National Stock Exchange (NSE). Overall we tested for abnormal trading volume, abnormal price movement, individual stock reversal and stock pinning on expiration days. To the best of our...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

Portfolio diversification may not always lower the portfolio risk, but may actually increase it. It depends on the long memory and distributional stability characteristics of the underlying rates of return. This disturbing result is based on the theoretical Fama- Samuelson proposition of...