We contribute to the debate on whether institutional investors have an information advantage in a novel way – by investigating institutional options holdings. We find that net institutional option holdings predict both future abnormal stock returns and earnings surprises, particularly for...

We ask whether option prices contain information on the likelihood and direction of jumps in the underlying stock prices. Applying the partial least squares (PLS) approach to the entire surface of the implied volatilities (IV), we show that option prices can successfully predict downward jumps...

We propose a method to extract the risk-neutral distribution of firm-specific stock returns using both options and credit default swaps (CDS). Options and CDS provide information about the central part and the left tail of the distribution, respectively. Together but not in isolation, options...

Informed traders may prefer the options market to the stock market for reasons including the leverage effect, transaction costs, restrictions on short sale. Many studies try to predict future returns of stocks using informed traders' behavior in the options market. In this study, we examine...

An option market maker incurs funding costs when carrying and hedging inventory. To hedge a net long delta inventory, for example, she pays a fee to borrow stock from the security lending market. Because of haircuts, she posts additional cash margin to the lender which needs to be financed at...

The study proposes an arbitrage-free methodology of VIX term structure modeling that is tailored to handle the most actively traded VIX options. Under the model, the evolution of future VIX is completely determined by the volatility function of forward VIX squared normalized by VIX futures...

I investigate the relation between option prices and daily stock return serial correlation. I demonstrate that the variance ratio, calculated as the ratio of realized to implied stock return variance, has both a contemporaneous and predictive relation with stock return serial correlation. The...

We study the information content of foreign exchange (FX) option volume using a unique dataset on over-the-counter FX options with disclosed counterparty identities and contract characteristics. Our study shows that FX option volume can predict future exchange rate returns, especially when the...

This paper investigates the performance of option investments across different stocks by computing monthly returns on at-the-money straddles on individual equities. It finds that options with high historical returns continue to significantly outperform options with low historical returns over...

In this paper, we propose an easy-to-use yet comprehensive model for a system of cointegrated commodity prices. While retaining the exponential affine structure of previous approaches, our model allows for an arbitrary number of cointegration relationships. We show that the cointegration...