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The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the underlying option impacts an insider’s propensity to purchase and sell before corporate announcements, the proportion of insiders’ trading after announcements relative to before announcements, and the insider’s profitability around corporate announcements.

The authors test whether the timing information and option have impacted on the tendency of insider trade, the percentage of all shares traded by insiders in the post-announcement to pre-announcement periods and the average cumulative abnormal stock returns during the pre-announcement period.

Insiders’ propensity to trade before announcements is higher for stocks without options listed than for stocks with traded options. This result is stronger for unscheduled announcements than for scheduled ones. The proportion of insiders’ trade volume after announcements relative to before announcements in stocks that have not options listed is higher than those in stocks with traded options. The positive relationship between the insiders’ signed volume and the informational content of corporate announcements is stronger in stocks without traded options than in stocks with options listed. Insider trades prior to unscheduled announcement are more profitable than those before scheduled ones.

The paper examines whether there is a difference between the effects of optioned stock and non-optioned stock. Roll et al. (2010) use the relative trading volume of options to stock ratio (O/S) to proxy for informed options trading activity. Future research could explore the impact of O/S. Moreover, the authors examine how insiders with private information use such information to trade in their own firms. Mehta et al. (2017) argue that insiders also use private information to facilitate trading (shadow trading) in linked firms, such as supply chain partners or competitors. Therefore, future research could consider the impact of shadow trading.

Since the insider’s propensity to buy before announcements in stocks without options listed is larger than in stocks with traded options and the relationship is stronger for unscheduled announcements than for scheduled ones, the efforts of regulators should focus on monitoring insider trading in stocks without options listed prior to unscheduled announcements.

First, Lei and Wang (2014) find that the increasing pattern of insider’s propensity to trade before unscheduled announcements is larger than that before scheduled announcements. The authors document the underlying option has impacted the insider’s propensity to purchase and sell, and the relationship is stronger for unscheduled announcements than for scheduled ones. Second, related studies show insider’s trading activity has shifted from periods before corporate announcements to periods after corporate announcements to decrease litigation risk. This paper find the underlying option has influenced the proportion of insiders’ trading after announcements relative to before announcements when the illegal insider trade-related penalties increase.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the change in speed of dissemination of order flow information on stock volatility of return in 79 traded companies at the Cairo and Alexandria Stock Exchange (CASE).

The paper examines the interaction of volatility and volume in 79 traded companies in CASE over a period from January 1998 to May 2005 and provides support for the TGARCH specification for explaining the daily time dependence on the rate of information arrival to the market for stocks traded on CASE.

The paper finds that information size and direction have a negligible effect on conditional volatility and, as a result, the presence of noise trading and speculative bubbles is suspected. It was found that the persistence in volatility is not eliminated when lagged or contemporaneous trading volume is incorporated into a GARCH model. It is shown that, when volume is further broken down into its expected and unexpected components, volatility persistence decreases. This is especially true after May 2001, which marks the beginning of a succession of major stock market reforms. It was also found that anticipated information shocks can have a negative impact on the volatility of return, particularly prior to May 2001.

The decrease in the negative relationship between expected volume and volatility after May 2001 suggests that trading efficiency and information dissemination have improved. This is an important finding for CASE as it encourages the reform momentum and reinsures foreign investors.

The aim of this paper is to examine the informational efficiency of prices of all exchange traded funds (ETFs) that are actively traded on the NYSE Arca, based on methodology developed by Chordia et al.

The authors estimate the speed of convergence to market efficiency based on short‐horizon return predictability from past order flows of 273 ETFs that were traded every day on the NYSE Arca during the first six months of 2008, and compare the resulting price formation process to that of shares traded on the NYSE and NYSE Arca.

Despite the significant differences in trading costs, volatility, and informational effects between ETFs and regular stocks, the paper documents that price adjustments to new information for ETFs occur in about 30 minutes, which is comparable to price adjustments for traditional stocks traded on Arca. In multivariate setting, the paper further shows that the speed of convergence to market efficiency of ETFs is not only significantly driven by volume, but also by the probability of informed trading.

The findings provide direct answers and insights to questions posed in a recent SEC concept release document. The analysis of the speed of convergence provides a feasible measure to assess how efficiently prices of ETFs respond to new information.

The authors are first to utilize the short‐horizon return predictability from historical order flow approach to evaluate the price formation process of ETFs and to provide evidence on the determinants of its efficiency.

The authors examine the factors that impact the growth of exchange traded funds (ETFs) from 1990 to 2020. The authors show the first-mover and winner-takes-all effects from top ETF issuers. Besides the longer history and larger asset under management (AUM), the ETFs being managed by top issuers have exhibited lower risks and higher trading volume. Delisted ETFs on the contrary has a shorter history, lower AUM, higher risks, and lower trading volume. For zombie ETFs, the authors find longer history, lower risks but lower AUM and trading volume, controlled for total expense ratio, return, volatility, Amihud (2002) illiquidity, bid-ask spread, turnover ratio, as well as year, issuer, asset class and region fixed effects. The authors further study the ETFs’ AUM and trading activities over the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and COVID-19 pandemic crisis, and find that the GFC has a significant negative impact while the COVID-19 has a positive impact on the ETFs’ popularity. The significant increase in AUM of ETF relative to common stocks during the COVID-19 is associated with retail investors’ holdings, as the authors document a significant reduction of institutional holdings at the aggregate level.

This paper aims to look at the effects of the closing call auction on market quality and behavior by using the natural experiment of its introduction at the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange.

Current paper studies the effect of closing call auction on various market quality factors such as liquidity, bid-ask spreads, volatility and market efficiency. Liquidity is proxied by trading volume. Bid-ask spreads provide a measure for the cost of trading in the market. Volatility is measured by using Parkinson’s (1980) volatility as in Huang and Tsai (2008). Last but not least, efficiency will be obtained by estimating a relative return dispersion measure as in Huang and Tsai (2008).

The introduction of the closing call auction leads to a significant decrease in the trading volume toward the end of the continuous trading. At the same time, trading activity taking place during the call auction significantly increases. This implies a redistribution of liquidity. The implementation of the closing call auction also improves market quality by reducing market inefficiency in terms of firm-specific noise. The study also documents that there exists no significant change in the cost of trading and intraday volatility in the post-period following the adoption of closing call auction.

This current study is the first one looking at this topic for the Abu Dhabi Stock Exchange. Specifically, this paper looks at the changes in trading volume, bid-ask spreads, intraday return volatility and market efficiency after the implementation of the closing call mechanism.

The nature of price volume relationship in asset market has been an interesting subject in financial research as it reveals a very important aspect which has implications for market efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to examine price volume relationships in Indian commodity futures market.

There are two competing models in price volume relationship. Mixture of distribution hypothesis, suggesting a positive contemporaneous relationship and sequential information arrival hypothesis (SIH), suggesting a positive intertemporal causal relationship. Both are tested using correlation coefficient and Granger causality test with vector auto regressive methodology.

Though there exists contemporaneous correlation between volume and price change in some of the cases, but in general on the basis of the presence of Granger causality it follows that SIH is supported.

As only three commodities futures have been studied in this paper, this study can be extended to include more number of commodities currently being traded so as to make it more exhaustive.

The research has been done with the data of MCX Gold, MCX Silver and MCX Crude. The results of causality suggest that inefficiency level is maximum in Silver which may be attributed to informational asymmetry.

The Indian commodity futures market is of very recent origin. Hence, very little research work has been undertaken in this space. The paper presents an assessment of the existence of informational asymmetry among the three commodity futures under the study.

This paper reports the results of the effects of the release, in the United Kingdom, annual reports and accounts (ARA), on security prices and trading volume of the U.K. firms. If the information reported in the annual reports and accounts (ARA) is relevant, the U.S. security market will respond to the release news through return and volume variances. Both signals are indicators of the relevance of the annual reports and accounts. The results of the analysis suggest the existence of unexpected returns to the annual reports and accounts and no corresponding U.S. trading volume response. The price results are in marked contrast to the findings of previous research that examined the information content of U.S. domestic annual reports, but do not detect a stock price response (e.g., Foster et al. 1986; Bernard and Stober 1989; Cready and Mynatt 1991). Our stock price analyses indicate that non‐U.S. GAAP accounting measures do not impede U.S investors' ability to use U.K. firms' ARA in valuing the sample firms. Indeed, U.S. investors use information from the ARA in their valuation of U.K. firms. Since trading responses to a disclosure are generally more easily detected than price responses (Cready and Hurtt 1999), these findings jointly suggest the provincial nature of the ARA release.

How is liquidity formed in emerging financial markets? Do traders preannounce their orders to attract outside liquidity providers (a practice referred to as sunshine trading)? The purpose of this paper is to study liquidity formation of infrequently traded stocks. It also investigates the role of preopening periods in the formation of liquidity.

The paper focuses on the eight largest stocks traded on the West African Bourse in 2000. The dataset includes all the orders submitted to the market from January 3 to December 13, including their time of placement, limit price, and proposed quantity, and the identity of the broker‐dealers who submitted them. The paper analyzes order placement strategies as well as preopening price efficiency and broker‐dealers' profits.

The evidence is consistent with broker‐dealers engaging in sunshine trading. First, large orders are placed early during the preopening period and are not cancelled. Second, for most of the stocks in our sample, preopening prices reveal information long before trading actually occurs. Third, large volumes are traded without significant price movements. Fourth, the most active brokers' profits are lower than less significant intermediaries' ones, indicating that the former do not manipulate the market.

The analysis suggests that the actual liquidity on the West African Bourse is higher than what is indicated by the average state of the order book. This might increase the attractiveness of African stock markets for global portfolio managers.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically study sunshine trading as theoretically analyzed by Admati and Pfleiderer.

Several studies have observed that stocks tend to drop by an amount that is less than the dividend on the ex-dividend day, the so-called ex-dividend day anomaly. However, there still remains a lack of consensus for a single explanation of this anomaly. Different from other studies, this dissertation attempts to answer the primary research question: how can investors make trading profits from the ex-dividend day anomaly and how much can they earn? With this goal, I examine the economic motivations of equity investors through four main hypotheses identified in the anomaly's literature: the tax differential hypothesis, the short-term trading hypothesis, the tick size hypothesis, and the leverage hypothesis.

While the U.S. ex-dividend anomaly is well studied, I examine a long data window (1975–2010) of Thailand data. The unique structure of the Thai stock market allows me to assess all four main hypotheses proposed in the literature simultaneously. Although I extract the sample data from two data sources, I demonstrate that the combined data are consistently sampled. I further construct three trading strategies – “daily return,” “lag one daily return,” and “weekly return” – to alleviate the potential effect of irregular data observation.

I find that the ex-dividend day anomaly exists in Thailand, is governed by the tax differential, and is driven by short-term trading activities. That is, investors trade heavily around the ex-dividend day to reap the benefits of the tax differential. I find mixed results for the predictions of the tick size hypothesis and results that are inconsistent with the predictions of the leverage hypothesis.

I conclude that, on the Stock Exchange of Thailand, juristic and foreign investors can profitably buy stocks cum-dividend and sell them ex-dividend while local investors should engage in short sale transactions. On average, investors who employ the daily return strategy have earned significant abnormal return up to 0.15% (45.66% annualized rate) and up to 0.17% (50.99% annualized rate) for the lag one daily return strategy. Investors can also make a trading profit by conducting the weekly return strategy and earn up to 0.59% (35.67% annualized rate), on average.

The turn-of-the-month (TOM) effect is observed as one of the seasonalities in many markets. The author examines the TOM effect in the KOSDAQ market and finds that the effect is significant. The TOM effect in the KOSDAQ market is not due to size, turn-of-the-year, turn-of-the-quarter or index rebalancing effect. The author also finds that individual and institutional traders do not trade and buy more stocks at the TOM than on the rest days, not consistent with existing explanations of the increased liquidity by individual investors or institutional window-dressing activity. When the author investigated the net buying volume and net turnover of each investor, the net volume and turnover of individual investors at the TOM were significantly lower than those on the other days, rejecting the hypothesis of their increased demand. Interestingly, net foreign volumes at the TOM are significantly higher than on the other days. Finally, using panel regressions, the author finds that stocks with a higher net buying volume of foreigners for the TOM period tend to have higher returns, while stocks with a higher net buying volume of individual traders for the TOM period are likely to have lower returns. The results confirm that the TOM effect is not due to the increased demand of individual investors. Instead, higher net buying volume by foreigners may partially cause the TOM effect. Therefore, this study contributes to the literature by revealing the presence of the TOM effect in the KOSDAQ market and the foreign role in the anomaly in the market even mainly traded by retail investors.