March 2020 packed 2 ½ years of normal U.S. stock market volatility into one month, making it the most volatile month on record. Daily variability clocked in at 6%, six times higher than the average over the past 90 years. How should an investor respond to such volatility? In this article we...

We develop a theoretical trading conditioning model subject to price volatility and return information in terms of market psychological behavior, based on analytical transaction volume-price probability wave distributions in which we use transaction volume probability to describe price...

Currency adjusted stock indices consider the impact of both stock value changes and underlying currency value changes on total wealth changes. This paper explores causality and cointegration of currency-adjusted indices using intraday data. This paper examines tick-by-tick data for seven...

The intention of this study was to document how closely households follow normative descriptions of financial behavior in relation to their financial planning horizon. Modern Portfolio Theory predicts that households, in general, exhibit risk aversion. Aversion to wealth volatility should...

I study the effects of risk and ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty) on optimal portfolios and equilibrium asset prices when investors receive information that is difficult to link to fundamentals. I show that the desire of investors to hedge ambiguity leads to portfolio inertia and excess...

Sudden big price changes are followed by periods of high and persistent volatility. I develop a tractable dynamic rational expectations model consistent with this observation. An infinity of agents possess dispersed information about future dividends and trade in centralized markets. Information...

S&P 500 Index option-based volatility indexes have untenable risk-return profiles. These volatility indexes are not designed with consideration of important real-world risk characteristics of options and fail to represent volatility as a differentiated asset-class with relevance to the long-term...

Retail investors pay over twice as much attention to local companies than non-local ones, based on Google searches. News volume and volatility amplify this attention gap. Attention appears causally related to perceived proximity: first, acquisition by a nonlocal company is associated with less...

We study how firm ambiguity---Knightian uncertainty---affects investor trading behavior using the options market as a laboratory. Greater ambiguity in the underlying asset negatively relates to both options open interest and options trading volume. The reduction in options trading activity is...