Using Option Implied Volatilities to Predict Absolute Stock Returns - Evidence from Earnings Announcements and Annual Shareholders' Meetings PDF Download

Author: Suresh Govindaraj
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36

View

Book Description
We provide evidence that an option implied volatility-based measure predicts future absolute excess returns of the underlying stock around earnings announcements and annual meetings of shareholders, even after controlling for the realized stock return volatility shortly before these information events, and the volatility of excess stock returns around these two events in the past. Our results imply that option traders anticipate the change in uncertainty around these two scheduled events, and also trade on the expected volatility. In addition, we show that net straddle returns (after transaction costs) around earnings announcements and annual meetings of shareholders are significantly and negatively related to the predicted volatility of returns around the events. This suggests that the writers of call and put options expect to be compensated for the predicted volatility. Overall, we find that option traders anticipate and correctly incorporate the volatility induced by the information released in quarterly earnings announcements, and annual meetings of shareholders.

Author: Stephen J. Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64

View

Book Description
The volatility information content of stock options for individual firms is measured using option prices for 149 U.S. firms during the period from January 1996 to December 1999. Volatility forecasts defined by historical stock returns, at-the-money (ATM) implied volatilities and model-free (MF) volatility expectations are compared for each firm. The recently developed model-free volatility expectation incorporates information across all strike prices, and it does not require the specification of an option pricing model.Our analysis of ARCH models shows that, for one-day-ahead estimation, historical estimates of conditional variances outperform both the ATM and the MF volatility estimates extracted from option prices for more than one-third of the firms. This result contrasts with the consensus about the informational efficiency of options written on stock indices; several recent studies find that option prices are more informative than daily stock returns when estimating and predicting index volatility. However, for the firms with the most actively traded options, we do find that the option forecasts are nearly always more informative than historical stock returns. When the prediction horizon extends until the expiry date of the options, our regression results show that the option forecasts are more informative than forecasts defined by historical returns for a substantial majority (86%) of the firms. Although the model-free (MF) volatility expectation is theoretically more appealing than alternative volatility estimates and has been demonstrated to be the most accurate predictor of realized volatility by Jiang and Tian (2005) for the Samp;P 500 index, the results for our firms show that the MF expectation only outperforms both the ATM implied volatility and the historical volatility for about one-third of the firms. The firms for which the MF expectation is best are not associated with a relatively high level of trading in away-from-the-money options.

Author: Yigit Atilgan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 30

View

Book Description
Prior research documents that volatility spreads predict stock returns. If the trading activity of informed investors is an important driver of volatility spreads, then the predictability of stock returns should be more pronounced during major information events. This paper investigates whether the predictability of equity returns by volatility spreads is stronger during earnings announcements. Volatility spreads are measured by the implied volatility differences between pairs of strike price and expiration date matched put and call options and capture price pressures in the option market. During a two-day earnings announcement window, the abnormal returns to the quintile that includes stocks with relatively expensive call options is more than 1.5 percent greater than the abnormal returns to the quintile that includes stocks with relatively expensive put options. This result is robust after measuring volatility spreads in alternative ways and controlling for ጿirm characteristics and lagged equity returns. The degree of announcement return predictability is stronger when volatility spreads are measured using more liquid options, the information environment is more asymmetric, and stock liquidity is low.

Author: Ping Zhou
Publisher: Financial Times/Prentice Hall
ISBN: 9780132947398
Category : Corporate profits
Languages : en
Pages : 0

View

Book Description
By trading on corporate earnings, investors can reliably profit in both up and down markets, while avoiding market risk for nearly the entire quarter. In this book, two leading traders and portfolio managers present specific, actionable techniques anyone can use to capture these sizable profits. Ping Zhou and John Shon have performed an unprecedented empirical analysis of thousands of stocks, reviewing tens of millions of data points associated with option prices, earnings announcement returns, and fundamentals. Their massive analysis has identified consistent opportunities associated with focusing on the magnitude of the market's reaction to earnings, not its direction. Option Trading Set-Ups for Corporate Earnings News offers concrete guidance for improving the likelihood of making correct forecasts, and managing the risks of incorrect forecasts. It introduces several ways to exploit option trading opportunities around earnings news, discuss crucial issues that most retail investors haven't considered, and explore aspects of earnings-related option trading that have never been empirically examined and documented before. For example, they identify hidden patterns and potential opportunities based on valuation, industry, volatility, analyst forecasts, seasonality, and trades that immediately follow earnings announcements. Simply put, trading on earnings reports offers immense profit opportunities, if you know how. This book provides incontrovertible facts and detailed strategies, not just theories and anecdotes!

Author: Qin Lei
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 43

View

Book Description
Using a broad sample of earnings announcements, we find that option call and put implied volatilities become increasingly misaligned as the earnings announcement dates (EAD) get closer. The percentage deviation between call and put implied volatilities increases monotonically in the one-month period leading up to the EAD. In addition, the direction of these deviations is consistent with the announcement returns of such earnings releases. More importantly, by adapting the earnings response coefficient (ERC) framework, we find that pre-earnings option trading actually increases rather than decreases the stock market response to the earnings announcements. In a cross section of earnings announcements, we find stronger stock market reaction from earnings announcements with greater abnormal implied volatility spread immediately before the EAD. By relating option volume to investor attention, we find higher pre-announcement option volume is associated with increased stock market response. Overall, our findings suggest that pre-earnings option trading helps alleviate the stock market under-reaction to earnings announcements and make the stock market response more complete.

Author: Brian Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996182300
Category : Investment analysis
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
Exploiting Earnings Volatility introduces an innovative new framework for evaluating, optimizing, and trading option strategies to profit from earnings-related pricing anomalies. Leveraging his extensive background in option-pricing and decades of experience in investment management and trading, Brian Johnson developed this inventive approach specifically to design and manage option earnings strategies. In an Active Trader article titled "Modeling Implied Volatility," Mr. Johnson introduced a formula for aggregating discrete volatility measures into a single metric that can be used with conventional option pricing formulas to accurately model implied volatility before and after earnings announcements. The practical application of this formula has profound implications for option trading and strategy development. Exploiting Earnings Volatility is written in a clear, understandable fashion and explains how to use this novel approach to 1) solve for the expected level of earnings volatility implicitly priced in an option matrix, 2) calculate historical levels of realized and implied earnings volatility, 3) develop strategies to exploit divergences between the two, and 4) calculate expected future levels of implied volatility before and after earnings announcements. Furthermore, Exploiting Earnings Volatility also includes two Excel spreadsheets. The Basic spreadsheet employs minimal input data to estimate current and historical earnings volatility and utilizes those estimates to forecast future levels of implied volatility around earnings announcements. The Integrated spreadsheet includes a comprehensive volatility model that simultaneously integrates and quantifies every component of real-world implied volatility, including earnings volatility. This powerful tool allows the user to identify the precise level of over or undervaluation of every option in the matrix and to accurately forecast future option prices and option strategy profits and losses before and after earnings announcements. The Integrated spreadsheet even includes an optimization tool designed to identify the option strategy with the highest level of return per unit of risk. Written specifically for investors who have familiarity with options, this practical guide begins with a detailed review of volatility and an explanation of the aggregate implied volatility formula. A separate chapter provides a conceptual and mathematical explanation of "True Greeks," accurate measures of risk and return sensitivity that reflect the real-world behavior of options. New option Greeks that are specific to earnings announcements are also introduced. Four chapters explain how to use the Basic and Integrated spreadsheets and two chapters document trade examples that use actual market data and analytical results from both spreadsheets to design a unique option strategy to exploit earnings-related pricing and volatility anomalies. The final chapter examines practical considerations and prospective applications of these innovative new tools. This book introduces a new analytical framework that may sound complicated at first, but is really quite intuitive. The formulas presented in the book are limited to basic high-school algebra. Mathematical relationships are also explained intuitively and depicted graphically. Most important, you will not need to perform any of these calculations manually. Exploiting Earnings Volatility includes a link to Excel spreadsheets that perform all of the calculations described in the book. The unique price and volatility behavior of options before and after discrete earnings announcements is an enigma to most option traders, even to many professionals. The aggregate volatility formula is relatively simple, but it has profound implications. When integrated with a real-world volatility model, it offers unique insights into earnings volatility, price behavior, option strategy construction, and prospective value-added opportunities.

Author: Dean Diavatopoulos
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
Past works have documented the predictive power of short-term stock return momentum and option volume ratios for future stock returns. We find option volume ratios have greater power to predict future returns when evidence prices are out of equilibrium exists, proxied for by increases in implied volatility. In our sample, short-term momentum has significant power to predict future stock returns only in the presence of evidence prices are out of equilibrium. We document that option volume ratios, changes in option implied volatility and short-term momentum, together, have significant predictive power for the cross-section of stock returns in subsequent periods. The difference between firms predicted to be strong performers and those predicted to be weak performers is more than 1% per month. Buy and hold returns for an equally weighted portfolio of predicted strong performers are 249% over the 1996-2009 period compared to a loss of 38% for predicted weak performers. S&P 500 returns over the same period were 60%.

Author: Yan Lu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 32

View

Book Description
Using option implied risk neutral return distributions before and after earnings announcements, we study the option market's reaction to extreme events over earnings announcements. While earnings announcements generally reduce short term uncertainty about the stock price, very good news does not reduce uncertainty and slightly bad news actually increases uncertainty. Cross-sectional tests of realized volatility reductions are largely in line with option implied findings, except for cases where very good news is released, which suggests an irrational level of perceived uncertainty in options markets following very good news. We also find that left tail probabilities decrease over earnings releases while right tail probabilities increase. We interpret these findings as evidence of maintained investor expectations that very good news is generally not released during earnings announcements combined with unwarranted skepticism at the release of such news.

Author: Tse-Chun Lin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 42

View

Book Description
We study the role of analysts and options traders in the information transmission between options and stock markets. We first show that the predictive power of option implied volatilities (IVs) on stock returns more than doubles around analyst-related events, indicating that a significant proportion of the options predictability on stock returns comes from informed options traders' information about upcoming analyst-related news. We examine three explanations for this finding: tipping, reverse tipping and common information. We find that analyst tipping to options traders is the most consistent explanation of these predictive patterns.

Author: Natalie Benz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
This master's thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of the behavior and influences of the S&P stock composition on implied volatility during earnings announcements that cover the period from 1996 to 2015. While prior studies have found that implied volatility increases in the pre-event period before an announcement, this thesis shows that implied volatility increases as soon as the announcement day is included in the lifetime of an option. In a liquid market, where information is processed much faster, the expectation of increased volatility is included in the lifetime of an option earlier and prevents an actual short-term updrift from occurring. Such liquid markets also exhibit some small deviations of implied volatility in the pre-announcement period, with increased uncertainty of the outcome of earnings announcements and divergent analyst forecasts. Cross-section regressions further reveal that relative drifts of implied volatility during earnings announcements are significantly explained not only by macroeconomic factors but also by the number of open contracts and the attention paid by investors and analysts. In a time when the CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) level is low and the spread between historical and implied volatility is high, overestimation of future volatility additionally leads to a stronger increase of drift.