CNBC's “Fast Money” regularly covers unusual option activity and refers to it as “smart money”. We investigate the impact of the CNBC coverage on underlying stock prices and whether investors can profit by following the “smart money”. We document an immediate spike in trading volume...

We decompose daily (close-to-close) changes of VIX into overnight (close-to-open) and trading-hour (open-to-close) changes. Consistent with the notion that non-trading creates uncertainty and trading resolves uncertainty, we find that there is generally an increase in VIX overnight and decrease...

We argue that active fund managers can pick stocks only when the market presents such opportunities. We propose measures of stock selection opportunity and show evidence that a significant portion of mutual funds time stock selection, i.e., trading more when stock selection opportunities are...

We show evidence that consistent with category-learning behavior, investors allocate more attention to macroeconomic news than to firm-specific news, such as earnings announcements. Despite the distracting effect of macroeconomic news on investor attention, we find that earnings announcements...

This study examines the concentration of active mutual fund managers' research efforts toward information-intense stocks and the degree to which they are successful in such efforts. Using the contribution of jumps to stock return variance as a proxy for information intensity, we find that both...

We examine the role of institutional investors underlying post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that while institutional investors generally herd on earnings news, such correlated trading among institutions does not eliminate or reduce market underreaction to earnings...

In this paper, we show that conditions derived under the CAPM ensure only weak exogeneity in a linear regression setting. Since strong exogeneity is not guaranteed, the OLS estimator of CAPM beta is only consistent but not necessarily unbiased. We provide empirical evidence that individual daily...

This paper evaluates the performance of volatility forecasting based on stochastic volatility (SV) models. We show that the choice of squared asset-return residuals as a proxy for ex-post volatility directly leads to extremely low explanatory power in the common regression analysis of volatility...