This paper investigates whether the overpricing of out-of-the money single stock calls can be explained by Tversky and Kahneman's (1992) cumulative prospect theory (CPT). We hypothesize that these options are expensive because investors overweight small probability events and overpay for...

We use a novel and unique dataset to measure attention to securities—individuals’ stock-following over time (watchlists)—to provide evidence that attention to securities reacts differently to various types of uncertainty. We find that market-wide uncertainty, measured by the VIX index,...

This paper improves continuous-time variance swap approximation formulas to derive exact returns on benchmark VIX option portfolios. The new methodology preserves the variance swap interpretation that decomposes returns into realized variance and option implied-variance.We apply this new...

This paper investigates the performance of option investments across different stocks by computing monthly returns on at-the-money straddles on individual equities. It finds that options with high historical returns continue to significantly outperform options with low historical returns over...

This research adapts the Black-Scholes option pricing model that is widely used in practice to a world where investors only form sufficiently rational expectations (expectations that deviate from perfection without creating arbitrage opportunities). Within the no-arbitrage interval of market...

The financial crisis of 2008 had many putative causes. Psychology was an important driver for human decisions underlying these causes. However, quantitative financial models have no “knobs” to dial psychology parameters, and so arguably cannot possibly cope with financial crises. We have no...

We use proprietary brokerage data to study trading patterns within a well-known financial market bubble: that in the Chinese warrants market. Persistently successful investors traded very actively and exhibited characteristics of de facto market makers. Unskilled investors unprofitably...