Why do analysts display overoptimism about the stocks they cover? According to the selection hypothesis, analysts pick their favorite stocks and are truly too optimistic. According to the conflict-of-interest hypothesis, analysts distort their view to maximize profits via commissions and...

We examine several measures of uncertainty to make five points. First, equity market traders and executives at nonfinancial firms have shared similar assessments about one-year-ahead uncertainty since the pandemic struck. Both the one-year VIX and our survey-based measure of firm-level...

Using trader-resolved data, we document lead-lag relationships between groups of investors in the foreign exchange market. Because these relationships are systematic and persistent, order flow is predictable from trader-resolved order flow. We thus propose a generic method to exploit trader...

We show that realized volatility, especially the realized volatility of financial sector stock returns, has strong predictive content for the future distribution of market returns. This is a robust feature of the last century of U.S. data and, most importantly, can be exploited in real time....