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...

When Bayesian risk-averse investors are uncertain about their assets' cash flows' exposure to systematic risk, stock prices react more to news in downturns than in upturns, implying higher volatility in downturns and negatively skewed returns. The reason is that, in good times, less desirable...

Despite momentum's strong historical performance, its returns have large negative skewness and occasionally experiences persistent strings of sharp negative returns, referred as "momentum crashes" in the recent literature. I argue that momentum crashes are due to crowded trades which push prices...

This paper investigates the empirical association between stock market volatility and investor mood-proxies related to the weather (cloudiness, temperature and precipitation) and the environment (nighttime length). Overall, our results suggest that cloudiness and length of nighttime are...

Define the number of buy-sell “switching points” as the number of times that individual traders change the direction of their trading. Based on the hypothesis that switching points take place in business time, market microstructure invariance predicts that the aggregate number of switching...

This paper examines the temporal relationship between sin stocks and investor sentiment using vector autoregressive models. It decomposes sin returns into a market-based and pure sin component and then performs dynamic statistical modeling on the pure sin portfolio. Next, it attempts to...

This paper provides market risk calculation for an equity-based trading portfolio. Instead of relying on the purely stochastic internal model method, which banks currently apply in line with the Basel regulatory requirements, we propose to include also alternative price mechanisms from the...

How do financial markets switch from states of optimism to pessimism and vice versa? Given that a financial market is currently stable, what is the probability that it will become unstable and crash? We answer those questions in the context of a natural experiment with risk sources of...