The Drift of Implied Volatilities Before Earnings Announcements

The Drift of Implied Volatilities Before Earnings Announcements
Author: Natalie Benz
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

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.

Volatility Spread and the Stock Market Response to Earnings Announcements

Volatility Spread and the Stock Market Response to Earnings Announcements
Author: Qin Lei
Publisher:
Total Pages: 43
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

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.

Option Strategies for Earnings Announcements

Option Strategies for Earnings Announcements
Author: Ping Zhou
Publisher: FT Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2012-10-15
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0132947404

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!

Option Strategies for Earnings Announcements

Option Strategies for Earnings Announcements
Author: Ping Zhou
Publisher: Financial Times/Prentice Hall
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Corporate profits
ISBN: 9780132947398

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!

Implied Volatility Functions

Implied Volatility Functions
Author: Bernard Dumas
Publisher:
Total Pages: 34
Release: 1996
Genre: Options (Finance)
ISBN:

Abstract: Black and Scholes (1973) implied volatilities tend to be systematically related to the option's exercise price and time to expiration. Derman and Kani (1994), Dupire (1994), and Rubinstein (1994) attribute this behavior to the fact that the Black-Scholes constant volatility assumption is violated in practice. These authors hypothesize that the volatility of the underlying asset's return is a deterministic function of the asset price and time and develop the deterministic volatility function (DVF) option valuation model, which has the potential of fitting the observed cross-section of option prices exactly. Using a sample of S & P 500 index options during the period June 1988 through December 1993, we evaluate the economic significance of the implied deterministic volatility function by examining the predictive and hedging performance of the DV option valuation model. We find that its performance is worse than that of an ad hoc Black-Scholes model with variable implied volatilities.

The Handbook of Equity Market Anomalies

The Handbook of Equity Market Anomalies
Author: Leonard Zacks
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2011-08-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118127765

Investment pioneer Len Zacks presents the latest academic research on how to beat the market using equity anomalies The Handbook of Equity Market Anomalies organizes and summarizes research carried out by hundreds of finance and accounting professors over the last twenty years to identify and measure equity market inefficiencies and provides self-directed individual investors with a framework for incorporating the results of this research into their own investment processes. Edited by Len Zacks, CEO of Zacks Investment Research, and written by leading professors who have performed groundbreaking research on specific anomalies, this book succinctly summarizes the most important anomalies that savvy investors have used for decades to beat the market. Some of the anomalies addressed include the accrual anomaly, net stock anomalies, fundamental anomalies, estimate revisions, changes in and levels of broker recommendations, earnings-per-share surprises, insider trading, price momentum and technical analysis, value and size anomalies, and several seasonal anomalies. This reliable resource also provides insights on how to best use the various anomalies in both market neutral and in long investor portfolios. A treasure trove of investment research and wisdom, the book will save you literally thousands of hours by distilling the essence of twenty years of academic research into eleven clear chapters and providing the framework and conviction to develop market-beating strategies. Strips the academic jargon from the research and highlights the actual returns generated by the anomalies, and documented in the academic literature Provides a theoretical framework within which to understand the concepts of risk adjusted returns and market inefficiencies Anomalies are selected by Len Zacks, a pioneer in the field of investing As the founder of Zacks Investment Research, Len Zacks pioneered the concept of the earnings-per-share surprise in 1982 and developed the Zacks Rank, one of the first anomaly-based stock selection tools. Today, his firm manages U.S. equities for individual and institutional investors and provides investment software and investment data to all types of investors. Now, with his new book, he shows you what it takes to build a quant process to outperform an index based on academically documented market inefficiencies and anomalies.

Earnings Quality

Earnings Quality
Author: Jennifer Francis
Publisher: Now Publishers Inc
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1601981147

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.