Research
Job Market Paper
In the Money? Option betting beyond lottery payoffs
Presentations: NFA 2024, MIT GCFP’s 11th Annual Conference 2024, SFA 2024
This paper studies In-The-Money (ITM) options, an underexamined yet economically significant segment of the options market. Using one of the most comprehensive databases of equity options, I find that retail investors' growing participation has amplified the economic relevance of ITM options. Using social media coverage to capture retail investors' attention to options trading, I find evidence that retail investors are not solely driven by skewness-seeking or lottery-like payoffs. Instead, retail traders actively engage with ITM options, particularly short-maturity call contracts on large-cap stocks. These options are perceived as offering consistent but smaller returns and higher exercise probabilities than Out-of-the-Money (OTM) options, which offer higher expected returns at lower probabilities. Yet, ITM investors of high-attention stocks in social media incur losses, offering new insights into retail trading behavior and gambling tendencies when trading options.
Working papers
Social Media and the Distortion of Price Revelation
With Charles Martineau and Jordi Mondria
Presentations: Future of Financial Information Conference 2023, Transatlantic Doctoral Conference London Business School 2023, Northern Finance Association Annual Meeting 2023, Midwest Finance Association Annual Meeting 2024, FMA 2024.
Media attention: Rotman Insights Hub.
Social media attention before earnings announcements is overly optimistic, fails to predict fundamentals, and generates buying pressure, leading to a 58 bps stock return as intermediaries seek higher returns for providing liquidity. Such price pressure distorts price informativeness ahead of announcements. A return reversal occurs immediately following announcements as markets correct mispricing. How stock prices respond to earning news is endogenous to the effect of social media in the pre-announcement price formation. A pre-announcement trading strategy based on expected social media attention yields 40 bps monthly alphas. Social media activity leads to predictable upward price pressure ahead of scheduled announcements, diminishing the informational content of stock prices.
Work in process
Option trading and price efficiency
With Charles Martineau
Building on the findings of my job market paper, this study examines the implications of retail option trading for asset prices. Specifically, we analyze the motivations and behaviors of retail investors in both the equity and options markets leading up to earnings announcements, and investigate how this activity impacts stock prices and, consequently, price efficiency. While previous literature has shown that option trading has an impact on stock prices volatility, our objective is to assess its specific implications for price efficiency. Analyzing this around earnings announcements is important, as our previous work shows that retail investor attention intensifies in the days leading up to these events, often resulting in directional trading that undermines price efficiency.
Pre Ph.D. research
When fear of floating meets the Taylor Rule. Recent evidence from Latin America
Advisor Charles Calomiris
This thesis aims to find evidence of the “fear of floating” in three Latin American countries: Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. By considering the role of the exchange rate in their monetary policy and describing it as an augmented forward-looking Taylor Rule with interest rate smoothing. If the Taylor Rule does not describe the behavior of their target rates, then evidence of “fear of floating” will be found.
Monitoring of fast-paced electronic markets
Bank of International Settlements Sep 2018, Study Group established by the Markets Committee
This report presents the Group’s findings. Among other sources, it is based on information from structured interviews with market participants, a Markets Committee workshop in January 2018, and a survey of central banks’ current and planned initiatives in market monitoring. The report highlights key recent developments in market structure, includes statistics on notable trends, and outlines the priorities and approaches of central banks in undertaking near-time and medium-term market monitoring.
Comité del Mercado Cambiario Mexicano May 2017