This paper proposes an approach to the intraday analysis of the dynamics of electricity prices. The growth optimal portfolio (GOP) is used as a reference unit in a continuous financial electricity price model. A diversified global portfolio in the form a market capitalisation weighted index approximates the GOP. The GOP, measured in units of electricity, is normalised and then modelled as a tim...

We demonstrate that legislation has a simple, yet previously undetected impact on stock prices. Exploiting the voting record of legislators whose constituents are the affected industries, we show that the votes of these “interested” legislators capture important information seemingly ignored by the market. A long-short portfolio based on these legislators’ views earns abnormal returns of over 9...

The classic Black-Scholes option pricing model assumes that returns follow Brownian motion, but return processes differ from this benchmark in at least three important ways. First, asset prices jump, leading to non-normal return innovations. Second, return volatilities vary stochastically over time. Third, returns and their volatilities are correlated, often negatively for equities. Time-change...

In laboratory experiments we explore the effects of communication and group decision making on investment behavior and on subjects’ proneness to behavioral biases. Most importantly, we show that communication and group decision making do not impact subjects’ overall proneness to the hot hand fallacy and to the gambler’s fallacy. However, groups decide differently than individuals, as they rely ...

This paper investigates the significance of dynamic conditional beta in predicting the cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns. The results indicate that the time-varying conditional beta is alive and well in the cross-section of daily stock returns. Portfolio-level analyses and firm-level cross-sectional regressions indicate a positive and significant relation between dynamic condi...

Rational herd behavior and informationally efficient security prices have long been considered to be mutually exclusive but for exceptional cases. In this paper we describe the conditions on the underlying information structure that are necessary and sufficient for informational herding and contrarianism. In a standard sequential security trading model, subject to sufficient noise trading, peop...

We analyze the optimal allocation of trades to portfolios when the cost associated with an allocation is proportional to each portfolio’s risk. Our investigation is motivated by changes in the over-the-counter derivatives markets, under which some contracts may be traded bilaterally or through central counterparties, splitting a set of trades into two or more portfolios. A derivatives dealer fa...

Do long-term and short-term options contain di!erential information? If so, can long-term options better di!erentiate among alternative models? To answer these questions, we "rst demonstrate analytically that di!erences among alternative models usually may not surface when applied to short-term options, but do so when applied to longterm contracts. Using S&P 500 options and LEAPS, we "nd that s...

Rational herd behaviour and informationally efficient security prices have long been considered to be mutually exclusive but for exceptional cases. In this paper we describe the conditions on the underlying information structure that are necessary and sufficient for informational herding and contrarianism. In a standard sequential security trading model, subject to sufficient noise trading, peo...

This paper considers a diversified world stock index in a continuous financial market with the growth optimal portfolio (GOP) as the reference unit or benchmark. Diversified broadly based portfolios, which include major world stock market indices, are shown to approximate the GOP. It is demonstrated that a key financial quantity is the drift of the discounted GOP, which can be expressed explici...