Net Buying Pressure Research Articles

The dark side of “flight-to-safety”: Evidence from macroeconomic tail risk beta

This study examines the impact of “flight-to-safety” (FTS) on price efficiency in the stock market, where FTS is driven by investors’ demand to hedge against macroeconomic tail risk (MTR). Stocks with higher MTR beta exhibit greater returns at higher MTR levels, suggesting a stronger capacity to hedge against MTR. We find that stocks with higher MTR beta are associated with lower price efficiency, and this negative effect intensifies with increased economic policy uncertainty. By examining the mechanism, we find that investors, particularly institutional investors, favor stocks with higher MTR beta, resulting in excessive net buying pressure and liquidity constraints. This overenthusiasm for safe-haven assets hinders the incorporation of information into stock prices, thereby reducing price efficiency.

Net buying pressure and the information in bitcoin option trades

Bitcoin prices are driven by upward as well as downward jumps and so the bitcoin implied volatility surface behaves differently from those of established options markets. We analyze tick-level Deribit option price data, demonstrating increasing support for the limits-to-arbitrage hypothesis. Hence market makers are managing order imbalance and inventory more effectively as Deribit bitcoin options trading volumes increases. On the demand side, volatility traders drive both at-the-money and out-of-the-money option prices, the latter also being driven by directional traders. Directional effects were most pronounced during the price bubble of 2021. Further refinements of our tests assess time-to-maturity and time-of-day effects.

Net Buying Pressure and Informed Trading in the Options Market: Evidence from Earnings Announcements

By employing the modified net buying pressure as a measure of informed option trading, this study tested whether option trading around quarterly earnings announcements is either directionally motivated and/or volatility motivated. We found evidence that is consistent with the idea that option investors have private information prior to positive earnings announcements and use at-the-money options to exploit their informational advantage. In the post-event period, however, informed option investors trade by using deep-out-of-the-money and out-of-the-money options. We documented limited evidence on the volatility-motivated option trading, and our results suggest that this type of option trading could be motivated by hedging purposes only.

Investors’ net buying pressure and implied volatility dynamics

This study reexamines the influence of different investor types' net options demand on the KOSPI200 options-implied volatility dynamics. We extend Bollen and Whaley (2004) by accounting for options traders' hedging demand for futures contracts, intraday seasonality, dynamic impacts of net buying pressure on implied volatility, and the effect of regulatory reform in the options market. Our empirical analyses provide evidence for the direction-learning behavior of foreign institutional investors. We further show that foreign institutions’ net demand is the most informative about the underlying market volatility independent of the market reform, while domestic retail investors become partially informed only after the reform.

Leverage constraints and corporate financing decisions

AbstractWe examine the impact of investors’ leverage constraints on corporate financing decisions. We use mutual fund flow to capture the net buying pressure from leverage‐constrained investors’ demand for high‐beta stocks. We show that firms confronted by the constrained funds’ excessive trading pressure are more likely to issue a seasoned equity offering and conduct stock‐based mergers and acquisitions, and their managers engage in more insider sales than those facing low or little trading pressure. Our results are robust to controlling for the short‐sales constraints of mutual funds and are consistent across different stages of the business cycle.

Intraday option price changes and net buying pressure

ABSTRACT We re-examine the effect of net buying pressure on options-implied volatility changes by analysing ultra-high-frequency microstructure data. Intraday relationships between option price dynamics and investors’ net demand are explained by the direction-learning hypothesis.

The impact of net buying pressure on index options prices

AbstractThis study examines whether the demand for options, as measured by the net buying pressure of index options, explains the implied volatility structure created by options prices. We decompose the buying pressure into the direction‐motivated (i.e., delta‐informed) and the volatility‐motivated (i.e., vega‐informed) demand for options. After controlling for options traders' hedging demand, we find that both delta‐ and vega‐informed trading play significant roles in explaining changes in implied volatility. Foreign institutions are more directionally informed in index options trading than their domestic counterparts are. Domestic investors effectively implement volatility trading using put options.

The impact of net buying pressure on VIX option prices

AbstractThis paper analyzes the impact of intraday trading activity on option prices in the Volatility Index (VIX) options market. Our results show that there is a temporal relationship between net buying pressure (NBP) and changes in implied volatility of VIX options. Moreover, an increase in NBPs lowers the next‐day delta‐hedged option returns. Using several measures proxying for limits to arbitrage, the average levels of the implied volatility curve rise when limits to arbitrage are severe. A trading strategy in the VIX futures market constructed by using the NBP generates an average annualized return of 10.09%.

News-based supervised sentiment analysis for prediction of futures buying behaviour

This study examines the predictability of real-time news data on investors’ buying behaviour in the futures market, using supervised sentiment analysis. Market sentiment or traders’ buying behaviour is captured at the bid-ask stage of price formation using the net buying pressure (NBP). Any significant change in NBP patterns defines an “interesting market event”. Real-time news headlines are automatically labelled using interesting market events, assuming a lag between the market information and its impact on buying behaviour. News was found to have an impact on the market buying behaviour of the S&P NIFTY index futures with an optimal lag of 5 minutes. Manual labelling of the news data validated this empirical finding.

Order Flow Toxicity under the Microscope

We empirically examine which components of modern markets’ message traffic are effective advanced indicators of impending illiquidity shortfalls. Using detailed message-level data from the National Stock Exchange (NSE) of India that flags the messages of HFTs, agency ATs, and non-ATs, we show that, after controlling for volume, volatility, and other traders’ activity, only the HFTs’ net buying pressure, computed from the inflow of both aggressive and non-aggressive orders, signals toxicity, and precedes increases in both immediacy costs and price impact in the short run. Consistent with theories of active risk management, cancellations and revision of outstanding limit orders add to the overall signaling capacity of the HFTs’ net buying pressure. Market-wide indicators of the HFTs’ net buying pressure add extra power in anticipating single-stock liquidity falls.

Investor sentiment and evaporating liquidity during the financial crisis

This study examines how investor sentiment affected equity liquidity and trading behavior during the financial crisis of 2007–2008. Using intraday data on equity index and financial ETFs, we show significant asymmetric response to investor sentiment on quoted spread, market depth, asymmetric depth, and net buying pressure. We also document that funding constraints can further increase the asymmetric impact of investor sentiment on liquidity and trading behavior. Our results can be explained by the psychological bias of negativity and help investors and risk management practitioners comprehensively understand why and how the evaporation of liquidity accelerates during the financial crisis.

Government interventions and equity liquidity in the sub-prime crisis period: Evidence from the ETF market

Using bank bailout and funding injection actions to measure government interventions, this study explores whether the announcements of these actions could improve equity liquidity in the subprime crisis period. Our empirical results show that funding injections and bailout actions can both improve equity liquidity and increase net buying pressure, especially for the Paulson plan and the rescue of AIG from bankruptcy. The funding injection actions can improve equity liquidity more significantly than bailout actions.

The Informational Role of Index Option Trading

Do order flows in index derivatives capture informed trading? We show that net buying pressure in index put options traded on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) positively and robustly predicts SP specifically in index futures and the ETF on the index, as well as order flow in the underlying index. The contrarian nature of return prediction from option order flow (net put buying predicts a higher index return) suggests that market makers who take the other side of the option orders have private information, and set quotes to attract orders from outside customers and brokers. Supporting the notion that market makers lower spreads to attract trading when they have information, we find that the predictive ability of put order flow for index options is higher when puts are more liquid.

Net Buying Pressure and Option Informed Trading

To differentiate between the effects of volatility trading and direction trading on an option market, this study decomposes net buying pressure of options into volatility‐motivated demand and direction‐motivated demand and examines their information content accordingly. With the two proposed measures, we find that changes in implied volatility of TAIEX OTM put options are driven by both volatility trading and directional trading over the sample period before the onset of the 2011 U.S. debt‐ceiling crisis, though the volatility trading effect is less than the directional trading effect. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 37:238–259, 2017

Analysis of the QQQ spot and option volatility behaviour around the QQQ move from AMEX to NASDAQ

In this paper, we study the behaviour of QQQ volatility in the spot and option markets around QQQ's move from AMEX to NASDAQ on 1 December 2004. We test whether the QQQ option implied volatility has changed around this event and whether this was a result of a change in spot volatility or hedging demand. We find that indeed the QQQ option implied volatility has changed around the time of the move. We document that neither QQQ spot volatility nor speculation has had an impact on the implied volatility change. We find that investor hedging activity is the driving force behind this change, in support of Bollen and Whaley's net buying pressure hypothesis. To the best of our knowledge, analysis of spot and option markets around moves of trading from one exchange to another and name changes have not been done before.

The Impact of Volatility and Net Buying Pressure on the Trading Demand of Speculators and Hedgers

We investigate the ways in which the net buying pressure of options and the volatility of the underlying asset affect the trading demand for speculation and hedging in TAIEX options. We place particular focus on an examination of whether any changes were discernible in the volatility effects after the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, and find that volatility seems to have had little significant impact on the trading demand of either speculators or hedgers; however, the net buying pressure of OTM calls and ATM puts are found to provide significant explanatory power on the trading demand of both types of investors. Furthermore, a significant change is found after the subprime crisis in the trading activities of speculators, who are generally found to have become more risk-averse, resulting in a reduction in their option positions when there is any sharp increase in risk in the underlying asset.

Investor sentiment and interest rate volatility smile: evidence from Eurodollar options markets

This paper studies the extent to which investor sentiment affects the Eurodollar option smile and finds that there is the dynamic interplay between sentiment-driven investors and arbitrageurs. The results reveal a significant relation between investor sentiment and interest rate volatility smile. The significant relations are stronger for put options, for short-maturity options, and for periods with higher uncertainty. The results are robust when considering controlling variables, net buying pressure, different interest rate option models, model-free method, or excluding rational components from the sentiment measures. Our findings favor the limits to arbitrage hypothesis against the positive feedback hypothesis, suggesting that the sentiment effect is transitory. Change in investor sentiment explains the time-varying smile that can be explained neither by rational interest rate models nor by net buying pressure.

Implied volatility smiles, option mispricing and net buying pressure: evidence around the global financial crisis

AbstractUsing the recent global financial crisis as an exogenous setting, we examine the presence and source of implied volatility smile phenomena in Australian S&P ASX 200 index options. We find a pronounced implied volatility smile for index puts in both bull and bear markets and a smile for index calls in the bear but not bull market. Implied volatilities of out‐of‐the money puts tend to be upwards biased whilst those of calls tend to be downwards biased. We also find that the bias in implied volatilities yields excess returns based on unhedged and delta‐neutral trading strategies, suggesting that implied volatilities are related to option mispricing. Net buying pressure from market participants appears to be a source of mispricing in the case of out‐of‐the‐money index puts with excess demand particularly pronounced during the bull period before the global financial crisis unfolded.

Business Cycles and Net Buying Pressure in the S&P 500 Futures Options

Abstract We analyse the cyclical behaviour and intraday pattern of net buying pressure in the S&P 500 futures options market. The results suggest that the net buying pressure of puts is counter‐cyclical and is more intense during contraction periods. The trading profits for selling put options during contraction periods thus far exceed those during expansion periods. Net buying pressure also exhibits an intraday pattern. Trading profits in the early trading sessions are higher than those for the rest of the day. In addition, we show that hourly‐basis hedging yields smaller profits than daily‐basis hedging, which suggests that the trading profits based on daily‐basis hedging may contain a risk premium associated with discretely rebalanced ‘risk‐free’ option portfolios.

The information content of net buying pressure: Evidence from the KOSPI 200 index option market

This study investigates whether net buying pressure contains information, using the intraday data of the KOSPI 200 index option market. We document that the net buying pressure of call (put) options raises the implied volatilities of calls (puts), while the net buying pressure of put (call) options lowers the implied volatilities of calls (puts). Moreover, investors appear to buy call (put) options if the underlying asset price is expected to rise (fall). These relationships between net buying pressure and implied volatility can be accounted for by the direction learning hypothesis, which states that traders with information about the future movements of stock prices trade in the option market before trading in the stock market.