We use a unique, non-public dataset of individual trader positions in 17 U.S. commodity futures markets to provide novel evidence on those markets' financialization in the past decade. We then show that the correlation between the rates of return on commodities and equities rises amid greater...

This paper develops a new approach for variance trading. We show that the discretely-sampled realized variance can be robustly replicated under very general conditions, including when the price can jump. The replication strategy specifies the exact timing for rebalancing in the underlying. The...

Do equity investors care about pay dispersion and income inequality? We address this question by examining equity markets' reaction and investors' portfolio rebalancing in response to the first-time disclosure by U.S. public companies of the ratio of CEO to median worker pay in 2018. We find...

The question of whether and to what extent option trading impacts underlying stock prices has been of interest since options began exchange-based trading in 1973. Recent research presents evidence of an informational channel through which option trading impacts stock prices by showing that...

We overview exchange-traded funds and notes mechanism and market. We consider different classes of ETFs: long, short, unleveraged, leveraged. We show tables and graphs of leveraged and short ETF behaviors for up and down moves for educational purposes. We describe historical behavior of several...

Manipulation in the VIX settlement can cause significant losses to investors. Analysing high-frequency data, we present indications of VIX manipulation accelerating since 2017. Deviations have an upward direction and average at around 6%. Specific effects accompany settlement days. The put/call...

This paper explores the variance risk premium in option returns across twenty different futures, including equities, bonds, currencies, and commodities (energy, metals, and grains). We implement a novel model-free methodology that constructs tradable option portfolios, which replicate realized...

Max Pain price is the strike price at which the total payoff of all options (calls and puts) written on a particular stock, and with the same expiration date, is the lowest. We construct a measure of (potential) Max Pain gain/loss, sort stock prices according to this measure, and find that a...

We show that the stochastic dominance (SD) approach to the valuation of index options in frictionless markets allows the derivation of a unique variance risk premium and price of volatility risk based only on the underlying return and volatility dynamics for a wide class of stochastic volatility...

Annual rebalancing of the S&P GSCI provides a novel identification of the impact of predictable order flows from index investors in commodity futures markets. Using the 24 commodities included in the S&P GSCI for 2004–2019, we show that cumulative abnormal returns to a long-short strategy...