Investment Strategies, Trading Information And Option Market: Evidence From The Toronto Stock Exchange

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates the relationship between equity price change and volume in order to determine the extent to which option trading affects the absolute price?volume relationship. The analysis is based on Zellner's 'Seemingly Unrelated Regression, (SUR) method shows that, on average, the trading volume of option eligible equity issues is less sensitive to price changes than the volume of equity issues without options. This result supports the hypothesis (Ross, 1976) that investors may be more inclined to turn to the option market rather than acting directly on the securities in order to carry out their different investment strategies on the stock market. A direct implication of this finding suggests that investment strategies that use both volume and price change to make inferences for investment decisions have to integrate, at least when dealing with an option eligible equity, both stock and option markets into their analysis.