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The paper's aim is to explore the impact of statistical arbitrage and high-frequency trading as hedge fund investment strategies that have a significant impact on the environment of corporations.

The paper is a meta-analysis of the role of investment strategies within complex systems.

The growth of hedge fund investment activity based on statistical arbitrage tends to produce a vulnerability; more funds using the strategy helps to create the profitable outcomes that the strategy relies upon. However, the growth also reduces the time lines of profitability and produces an underlying instability based on overlapping holdings and the use of leverage. The shortened timelines also create a further impetus towards technological competition and promotes high frequency trading, which then introduces further vulnerabilities based on “stop-loss cascades”.

Much of the trading creates a superficial form of liquidity, which gives a limited sense of market vulnerabilities. The basis of complex interactions between high frequency traders is also not clearly understood. Researchers and agents of policy ought to pay greater attention to the issues than is currently the case.

The area is one that is under-researched.

The purpose of this paper is to study the pricing efficiency of convertible bonds and arbitrage opportunities between the convertible bonds and the underlying stocks thus improve market efficiency.

Using nonparametric fixed effect panel data model, the authors build pricing model of convertible bonds and obtain fitted value for them. Then the authors constructs simultaneous confidence band for the smooth function to identify mispricing and study the pricing efficiency and arbitrage opportunities of convertible bonds.

Result shows, convertible bonds’ prices largely depend on stock prices. Pricing efficiency does not improve during the past few years as there are quite a few trading opportunities. Arbitrage opportunities increase as the stock prices approach it maxima, and selling opportunities for convertible bonds surpass buying opportunities which indicates that investors use market neutral strategies to arbitrage. Pricing efficiencies varies a lot and it is affected by the features of the stocks and convertible bonds. Index stocks eligible for margin trading with high liquidity enjoy higher pricing efficiency.

The study does not take into account trading cost and risk management measures.

Arbitrage between the underlying and the convertible bonds is profitable and contributes to pricing efficiency therefore should be encouraged. The regulator should pay attention to the extreme mispricing of the underlying and convertible bonds which cannot be corrected by the market as there might be manipulation.

Since traditional pricing methods are based on the framework of non-arbitrage equilibrium with the assumption of balanced and perfect market, there are many restrictions in the pricing process and the practical utility is somewhat limited, and the impractical assumptions lead to model risk. This study uses nonparametric regression to study the pricing of convertible bonds thus circumvents the problem of model risk. Simultaneous confidence band for smooth function identifies mispricing and explicitly reflects the variation of pricing efficiency as well as signalizes trading opportunities. Application of nonparametric regression and simultaneous confidence band in derivative pricing is advantageous in accuracy and simplicity.

We examine the impact of the unique Japanese stock market microstructure on the pricing of stock index futures contracts. We use intraday transactions data for the Nikkei 225 Futures contracts in Osaka and the corresponding Nikkei 225 Index in Tokyo. Incorporating more realistic transaction-cost estimates and various institutional impediments in Japan, we find that the time-varying liquidity of some component shares of the index in Tokyo represents the most critical impediment to intraday arbitrage and often causes futures prices in Osaka to deviate significantly and persistently from their no-arbitrage boundary, especially for longer-lived contracts.

This study investigates the impact of program trading on the market volatility by separating the volatility into long-run and short-run components using VA-CEGARCH model. This approach allows us to observe the two channels through which the program trading affects the market volatility. We have following results. Program trading and non-program trading both have no impact on the long-run component but do increase short-run component. In case of short-run component‘ program trading has a larger impact compared to non-program trading. Secondly, in both daily and intra-day analysis, arbitrage program trading is found to have a larger impact on short-run components than non-arbitrage program trading.

Thirdly, ARCH effects are found in short-run components of daily analysis and long-run components of intra-day analysis. And the volatility’s asymmetric responses to good or bad news are introduced through long-run components. What is noteworthy is the fact that non-arbitrage program trading is actually found to reduce short-run volatility in the intra-day analysis.

Which means that non-arbitrage program trading, such as hedging transactions, helps promote intra-day market stability. Our findings mean that the short-run component is the main channel by which program trading produce unnecessary market volatility.

The KOSPI200 mini option introduced in July 2015 is the derivative of which trading multiplier is reduced to one-fifth of the regular options. This study explored the pairs trading opportunities arising from the price spread between the KOSPI200 regular options and the mini options during the sample period from August 2015 to March 2016 and measured the profits of pairs trading. The main results are summarized as follows. First, the most frequency of pairs trading with high profit was observed for in-the-money options. On the other hands, the frequency of pairs trading opportunities is low and the profit is relatively small for out-of (at)-the money options. Second, for in-the-money options, arbitrage opportunities were captured every three minutes on an average, but the elapsed time between arbitrage opportunity opportunities on out-of-the money options exceeded 10 minutes on average. Third, pairs trading opportunities occur uniformly throughout the day, but profit tends to increase in the afternoon than in the morning. This indicates that price efficiency in options market deteriorates and profit of arbitrage trading with price disparity is higher in the afternoon than that of the morning trading. In addition, the profitability of pairs trading with low liquidity was cross-sectionally higher than those with high liquidity.

When a stock is added into the S&P 500 Index, it in effect becomes cross-listed in the Index derivative markets. When index-based trading strategies such as index arbitrage are executed, the component stocks are directly affected by such trading. We find increased volatility of daily returns, plus increased trading volume for the underlying stocks. Utilizing a list of S&P 500 Index composition changes over the period September 1976 to December 2005, we study the market-adjusted volume turnover and return variance of the stocks added to and deleted from the Index. The results indicate that after the introduction of the S&P 500 Index futures and options contracts, stocks added to the S&P 500 experience statistically significant increase in both trading volume and return volatility. Both daily and monthly return variances increase following index inclusion. When stocks are removed from the index, though, neither volatility of returns nor trading volume experiences any significant change. So, we have new evidence showing that Index inclusion changes a firm's return volatility, and supporting the destabilization hypothesis.

The existence of parallel imports (PI) raises a number of interesting policy and strategic questions, which are the subject of this survey article. For example, parallel trade is essentially arbitrage within policy-integrated markets of IPR-protected goods, which may have different prices across countries. Thus, we analyze fully two types of price differences that give rise to such arbitrage. First is simple retail-level trade in horizontal markets because consumer prices may differ. Second is the deeper, and more strategic, issue of vertical pricing within the common distribution organization of an original manufacturer selling its goods through wholesale distributors in different markets. This vertical price control problem presents the IPR-holding firm a menu of strategic choices regarding how to compete with PI. Another strategic question is how the existence of PI might affect incentives of IPR holders to invest in research and development (R&D). The global research-based pharmaceutical firms, for example, strongly oppose any relaxation of restrictions against PI of drugs into the United States, arguing that the potential reduction in profits would diminish their ability to innovate. There is a close linkage here with price controls for medicines, which are a key component of national health policies but can give rise to arbitrage through PI. We also discuss the complex economic relationships between PI and other forms of competition policy, or attempts to limit the abuse of market power offered by patents and copyrights. Finally, we review the emerging literature on how policies governing PI may affect international trade agreements.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the profitability of different pairs selection and spread trading methods using the complete data set of commodity futures from Dalian Commodity Exchange, Shanghai Futures Exchange and Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange.

Paris trading methods that are proposed in the literature are compared in terms of the risk-adjusted returns visa in-sample and out-of-sample backtesting and bootstrapping for robustness.

The empirical results show that pairs trading in the Chinese commodity futures market offers high returns, whereas, the profitability of these strategies primarily depends on the identification of suitable pairs. The observed high returns are a compensation for the spread divergence risk during the potentially longer holding periods, which implies that the maximum drawdown is more crucial compared to other risk-adjusted return measures such as the Sharpe ratio.

Complementary to the existing literature, for the Chinese commodity futures market, it is shown that if shorter maximum holding periods are introduced for the spread positions, then the pairs trading profits decreases. Therefore, the returns do not necessarily imply market inefficiency when the higher maximum drawdown associated with the holding period of the spread position is taken into account.