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We examine day-trading activities for 540 stocks traded on the Korea Stock Exchange using transactions data for the period from 1999 to 2000. Our cross-sectional analysis reveals that day-traders prefer lower-priced, more liquid, and more volatile stocks. By estimating various bivariate VAR models using minute-by-minute data, we find that greater daytrading activity leads to greater return volatility and that the impact of a day-trading shock dissipates gradually within an hour. Past return volatility also positively affects future day-trading activity. We also find that past day-trading activity negatively affects bid-ask spreads, and past bid-ask spreads negatively affect future day-trading activity. Finally, we find that day-traders use short-term contrarian strategies and their order imbalance affects future returns positively. This result is consistent with a cyclical behavior of day-traders who concentrate their buy or sell trades at the bottom or peak of the shortterm price cycles, respectively.

We test whether foreign investors price foreign exchange risk differently from local investors. Drawing from the closed-end country fund literature, we argue that both differential access to information by foreign versus local investors and different sources of exchange risk that investors face (economic or translation exposure) will lead to different pricing of the exchange risk associated with American Depositary Receipt (ADR) investments. We apply a two-step method to country portfolios of ADRs of Australia, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Our results show that foreign investors generally price exchange risk differently from local investors, and that the source and magnitude of differences in exchange risk pricing vary significantly across countries. Although significant differences in pricing exchange risk between foreign and local investors are observed for Australia, France, and Japan, no such pricing difference is noticed for the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the pricing differences observed for Australian and French ADRs are mainly attributed to the exchange risk of underlying share returns (economic exposure), whereas the pricing differences for Japanese ADRs are mainly attributed to the exchange risk associated with currency translation (translation exposure). We offer some explanations for our findings. 2005 The Southern Finance Association and the Southwestern Finance Association.

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This paper develops “Strategy Benchmark Index (SBI)” using KOSPI200 options data from January 2004 to March 2017, and then investigates their performances. The SBIs were constructed in the same way as those published daily by CBOE. To effectively analyze the performance of these SBIs, we classified them into four types : (1) Return enhancement SBIs (six indices), (2) Volatility trading SBIs (two indices), (3) Directional trading SBIs (two indices) and (4) Other SBIs (two indices). The return enchancement SBIs include bechmark indices tracking the performance of various covered call strategies and put writing strategies, which are generally used to increase investment returns. The volatility trading SBIs include benchmark indices tracking the performance of well-known volatility trading strategies such as butterfly spread and condor. Benchmark indices tracking the performance of various types of zero-cost collar strategies are classified into the directional trading SBIs. Our empirical results are as follows. First, the risk-adjusted performances of nine SBIs of the total twelve SBIs constructed from KOSPI200 index options has been shown to be great. Second, from a portfolio perspective, some SBIs can be helpful to improve the portfolio performance of CRRA (Constant Relative Risk Aversion) investors. These results imply that passive investment strategies with KOSPI200 index options can provide additional benefits that both equities and bonds do not provide. Third, even when we use the traditional mean-variance framework other than expected utility theory to verify the economic benefit of the SBIs, our empirical results are found to be still valid. In conclusion, our results suggest that some passive investment strategies using KOSPI200 index options would be beneficial to long term investors.