Options trading

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Contents

• List of Notations
• Introduction
• Model Specification
• Estimation
• Empirical Results
• Conclusion
• References
• Appendix

List of Notations

ATM - at-the-money options

AMC - after market close

BS - Black-Scholes

EA - earnings announcement

IV - implied volatility

Introduction

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires all publicly traded companies to release quarterly their financial reports. These financial reports are usually called earnings announcements as it contains firm's earnings per share (EPS), which everyone is paying attention to. The impact of earnings disclosure on asset returns was studied from various sides in huge amount of works. Ball and Brown (1968) were the first to investigate the impact of annual income report disclosure on firm's asset return. It was found that income number, which becomes available once a year, has a considerable effect on stock returns and that they adjust quickly supporting the efficient market hypothesis. Investigation of uncertainty surrounding the dates of income disclosure took place later and was discovered from various sides. For example, Levy and Yoder (1993) explored the impact of unscheduled news. Chiang and Chung (2012) studied the relation between insider trading and option returns around earnings announcements.

Investigation of stock uncertainty associated with the disclosure of income takes its roots from the early works of Beaver (1968) and May (1971). They stated that by analyzing both stock prices and option prices behavior they can distinguish between two forces governing the movements of the underlying. First one is the price reactions to particular scheduled events. The second one is associated with investors' anticipation of stock's reactions to future releases of the information which are currently not known. These researches have conducted ex-post studies to detect the specific pattern in stock's dispersion around earnings announcement dates. Ex-post studies are called so due to the fact that they need the stock's price observation during income disclosure dates and during nondisclosure dates to test whether the characteristics of the returns distribution differ in those two. Controlling for market risks, they tried to pose a causal link between the earnings announcement and changes in assets price distribution. Variance form of information hypothesis in their work lays in the base of my investigation. Formally they define their hypothesis to be as follows:

where

- rate of return of security ,

- rate of return on market portfolio,

- realized signal drawn from the set of all signals.

Thus the variance form information hypothesis tests whether the variance of the return distribution changes for some signal. In order to test the increasing variance profile during the earnings announcement dates, one should compare the measure of variance estimated during disclosure period with that during nondisclosure periods. The result of their work showed that the variance of the stock return remains constant except for the day of the announcement.

The first work that tried to link the behavior of stock returns variance and the option market was the work of Patell and Wolfson in 1979 and 1981. The aim of their study was to reveal to what extent the investors anticipation of the increase in stock variability due to income disclosure in the future would reflect in the current option prices. Patell and Wolfson's theoretical model was based on the fact that, according to Merton (1973), if the stock variance, that enters Black-Scholes formula of option pricing is not constant, but rather a deterministic function of time, then it can be measured as the average variance per unit of time from any valuation date.

Where - average variance to expiration measured at ; - instantaneous variance at time (Merton (1973) Basing on this assumption, the authors state that since this average variance incorporate the variance between the observation date and the announcement date, than it should be sensitive to all the changes in the underlying volatility during this period. Consequently, if there is indeed a significant increase in stock's return dispersion as the announcement date approaches then one should simply compare the implied average volatility at some two preannouncement dates and , where is the earnings announcement date:

Fig. 1 Patell, J. «Corporate Forecasts of Earnings per Share and Stock Price Behavior: Empirical Tests». Journal of Accounting Research 14, no. 2 (Autumn 1976): 246-76. AND M. Wolfson. «Anticipated Information Releases Reflected in Call Option Prices».

Due to the fact that this test would involve only preannouncement information on stocks and options, the fact that there might be a significant increase in variance will indicate that option prices are good indicators of stock return variability. However they outline that “the ability to predict future increases in stock price variability from current option price does not imply the existence of arbitrage opportunities” (Patlel and Wolfson, 1981). The authors reason this with the fact that as instantaneous variance is known function of time, then options prices already incorporate all the information and, thus, no arbitrage opportunities exist. The result of their work is consistent with the hypothesis that option prices reflect the investor's anticipation of approaching income disclosure dates. Their results also support the hypothesis that call option prices reflect investors' anticipation of earnings announcement dates and clearly indicate that income disclosure leads to increase in stock price variability. These facts were approved by Donders and Vorst (1996) on Dutch Market, while Isakov and Perignon (2001) did the same for Swiss market.

These works are crucial for my study due to the fact that they clearly show the increasing pattern of the stock return implied volatility during earnings announcement dates, and this result is verified for several markets. The specific pattern in option IV is a major determinant in the possibility to earn a return as it will be shown further.

As it was already said, Patell and Wolfson exclude the possibility of the arbitrage on the options market during the periods of income disclosure, as all the fluctuations in the underlying variance is already incorporated in the average variance which is a known function of time. In other words, option prices already incorporate this information and hence it is impossible to earn anything on that. This assumption was in the base of the work of Dubinsky and Johannes (2006) when they assumed the jump volatility to be distributed with mean zero. They extended the work of Patell and Wolfson in several ways. First of all they developed models incorporating jump of the stock price associated with EA for pricing options. The principle difference here is that they introduce discontinuity in the pricing model which was not assumed in Patell and Wolfson work. Secondly, they provide and implement the estimators of jump volatility. Finally, they discuss the evidence for risk premium, hedging and pricing. They also found that incorporating jumps is very important for option valuation and significantly decreases the pricing errors. Overall, they found extremely strong statistical evidence that earnings announcements influence the prices of the options.

The studies described above again approve that EA have significant effect of option prices and that option IV significantly increases prior to the announcement and decreases afterwards. Both these works exclude the possibility for the arbitrage. The further state that options prices prior to EA should already incorporate the information about variance associated with the jump in underlying price due to information release. If these were true, then there will be no possibility to earn any return using options. This would be tested in my work further.

In the framework of known pattern of volatility around scheduled events, such as earnings announcements, it is logical to consider the literature that considers strategies of investing in volatility:

In 2000 Donders, Vorst and Kouwenberg extended their research by combining the data on implied volatility, trading volume and open interest in order to access the information processing around EA at the Amsterdam market. Investors can trade on directional information in either the stock or option market and their work investigated whether option volume is informative about the future direction of the underlying price. There are several advantages in trading with options than with the underlying stocks. First of all options provide leverage opportunities which are not available to stock investors. Secondly, options provide better opportunities for risk management in case that earnings news moves price against your position due to their asymmetric payoff function. Thirdly, options allow investing in stock's volatility, which is impossibly in stock market. Due to the reasons described above, the authors expect that excess trading volume should be noticed on the option market when EA approaches and it should be greater than that on stock market. They also assumed that open interest will increase before EA and decrease afterwards. Moreover, they assumed that investors rather buy than sell the options anticipating the EA. In other words they expected to see that the demand on options rises prior to EA and, hence, push the option prices up. If this is the case, then the implied volatility would rise prior to EA and it would return to its normal level after the income disclosure. As a result of their study they found that trading volume in option market increases faster and stronger than that on stock market, which was in line with their expectations. Moreover, implied volatility of both calls and puts increases faster and higher than can be explained by the realized volatility in subsequent days prior to EA. It was also shown that higher prices indicate increased demand on options. These results lead to a conclusion that investors not only anticipate the changes in prices of the stock when EA approaches, but also invest in volatility.

Kaniel, Liu, Saar and Titman (2007) have showed that net individual trading prior to earnings announcements has predictive power about abnormal returns at the time of the announcement.

Pan and Potashman (2008) in their work «Volatility Information Trading in the Option Market» extended these results and showed that that the demand constructed from the newly opened bets support the predictability of the option demand predictability. Moreover they found that the demand constructed from the option volume that could be the part of straddle strategies Straddle is the option strategy that consists of the two options: call and put with the same strikes and maturities. This strategy aims to invest in volatility and would be discussed further in Model Specification section. has stronger predictive power of future volatility than the demand that could not be the part of the straddle strategies. Thus they showed that there is large volume of volatility trading and that a straddle is the main strategy for it. The stronger predictability of the volume with higher concentration of straddle trading is also consistent with the predictability originating volatility trading. Moreover, this result is consistent with hypothesis of informed volatility trading, as it is supported by the fact that volatility demand from transactions that open new positions is a stronger predictor of future volatility than demand that closes existing option positions.

This block of literature is crucial for my work, due to the fact that it proves the existence of trading on volatility during the periods of income disclosures. Moreover, these works prove that the large part of this trading consists of buying straddles - strategies that are the object of investigation of my work. In order to prove the importance of my research I would next present the existing literature that concentrates primarily on straddles.

While you do not know for sure the direction of the stock price at EA, you know for sure that it will jump somewhere as the volatility would rise due to uncertainty surrounding income disclosures. Volatility trading is specially designed for the cases when you do know or think that you know the future pattern of option volatility. There were not as many literatures concerning volatility trading as there were about volatility patterns around EA. I would discuss several base works concerning this side of the subject.

Coval and Shumway (2001) were the first to transfer the attention from option pricing to estimation of option returns. They explained the necessity to investigate option returns by several reasons. First one was that the analysis on option returns in risks made it possible to reveal the deviations from market efficiency. Second was that option returns make it possible to study very particular types of risks. In their particular work, they use delta-neutral straddles as an example of a strategy that is immune to either small market fluctuations or sharp crashes, but that is responsive to changes in market volatility. They looked on call, put and straddle risks and returns both theoretically and empirically and found out that taking into account the systematic risks, both calls and puts earn low returns. According to Black-Scholes and Merton options are redundant assets as they can be perfectly replicated by the existing assets on the market. Coval and Shumway's research has shown that delta neutral option strategies consistently yield negative returns, though they should yield the risk-free return if options were redundant. Consequently, if delta neutral strategy generates negative returns, there is evidence that options are not redundant. From practical point of view this means that investor can earn profit by simply entering short position in straddle. These results cannot be explained in the framework of capital asset pricing model, as it states that options should be priced in accordance with the systematic risk they bear. They propose to explain this finding through either the existence of the possibility that it is not the market risk that solely accounts for all the risk that should be considered when pricing options or through the fact that straddles can be used as hedging strategy against changes in volatility and this hedge comes at a cost. Driessen and Maenhout (2006) confirm these results on short term options in the UK and US markets. Sacretto and Sants-Clara (2009) find similar values in an extended sample.

Goltz and Ni Lai (2008) extend the research of Coval and Shumway in the sense that they looked at straddle returns at DAX market in more detail. They examined the time series dependence on various factors that can be used as proxies for beliefs about uncertainty such as stock market volume or credit spread. The authors have found that the returns of risk neutral straddles follows random walk so that it is impossible to predict future straddle prices from current ones. Expected utility maximizing investors allocate a considerable short position to the straddle strategy and this position leads to certainty equivalent gains, when compared to the case where the investor does not have access to the straddle strategy. However, the magnitude of the holding and the associated utility gains are strongly reduced when lowering the rebalancing frequency of the straddle strategy. It is necessary to outline here that all these works did not consider straddle returns in presence of some scheduled events, such as EA. They rather look at straddle returns when the investor holds it for some specific amount of time.

From the block of literature described above it is important to summarize that straddles generate strong negative returns when held for some period of time, not specific to any event.

From all the literature described above it can be noticed that there is a gap in two spheres of investigations: one is concerned with investigation of option IV behavior around EA, another is concerned with straddle returns when simply held for some period of time. The logical questions arise - will there be any return if straddles are used as a way of investing in volatility, when the volatility pattern is known.

Yuhang Xing and Xiaoyan Zhang have tried to answer this question in their recent work «Anticipating Uncertainty: Straddle Around Earnings Announcements». The found out that straddle returns are significantly positive at the EA and one day after it. They also confirm the result of Coval and Shumway (2001) that straddle returns earn significantly negative returns when held over some period of time not specific to any events. My work, will consider similar question which can be formulated as whether it is possible to get a return by using straddles around EA. However, I approached it differently and get the results that contradict those of Xing and Zhang. The sample used in my work is smaller, though the time span and data used are the same. I justify the choice of my data sample, and use other criteria for evaluating the significance of my result. At the end of my work I tried to compare the results and reasoning behind my results and results of Xing and Zhang.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. I would first provide a description of the straddle strategy. Then, in the Estimation sector I provide description of the dataset and estimation method. The Empirical Results section describes the results obtained. The next section concludes. Appendix contain all the final estimation results.

Model Specification

As it was already discussed above, trading through options is superior to trading in stocks due to several reasons. One and most important one for my work is that options allow an investor to trade earnings announcements in ways that are not possible with assets. This relates to volatility investment. Straddle is the most simple and popular volatility investment strategy.

Straddle Returns.

Directional earnings announcements are very difficult to forecast. Not only the difference between the real returns and market expectations is important in order to realize the returns, but also many other factors such as management outlook on the market and earnings surprise. Very often positive earnings surprise generates negative returns as it failed to meet market expectations. Hence it is not an easy task to predict the direction of the return associated with income disclosure. Moreover, even if you correctly predict the direction of return, you can lose due to insufficient magnitude of the stock price jump. Thus, long positions in options with the aim to guess the direction of the stock price movement are very risky. However, knowing that the volatility of the underlying is increasing towards the earnings announcement date, you can design such a strategy which will be immune to the direction of the underlying movement but is sensitive to the magnitude of these jumps. Volatility trading are such strategies. The common volatility investing strategy is a straddle. A straddle is a combination of a call and put options with the same underlying, strikes and maturity dates. The straddle is the simplest option strategy that is suited for playing on volatility. When investor is long in straddle he does not care about the direction of the underlying but he does care about the magnitude of this move. The payoff function of the straddle is looked like:

Fig.2 (source http://www.theoptionsguide.com/long-straddle.aspx)

Maximum profit of this strategy is unlimited. Maximum loss of this strategy is the premium paid for the call and put options. The profit of the long position in straddle has negative theta Theta, и, is the rate of change of the option price with time (Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance). Thus, as the expiration date approaches, straddle position loses money. This is due to the fact that we need time to catch the jump in the underlying but as the time passes there is little possibility that the jump will actually occur. This dependency is shown on the next picture:

Fig.3. (source: http://www.quantitative-finance-by-examples.com/long-straddle.html)

At the same time long position in straddle has positive vega Vega is the sensitivity of the option price to volatility. (Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance). Consequently as implied volatility rises the long position in straddle gains value. This is represented on the following graph:

Fig.4. Long Straddle - Effect of Changes in Implied Volatility (source: http://blog.themarketmessenger.com)

The return of a straddle is calculated as follows:

It is important to outline here that the assumption about the terms of entering and terminating the bid should be made. In my work I will consider two opposite scenarios. First, positive one, would assume entering and terminating long straddle position at mid-price . This means that options are bought and sold at the midpoint of the bid ask spread. Mid price execution of the strategy is very optimistic and aggressive as it assumes that you are able to trade at the significantly better price than others do, as you are able to purchase at a lower price than the market and sell at the higher price than the market. The second, conservative one, assumes entering the position at the most expensive price, ask price, and terminating at the cheapest one, offer price. This worst-price case could be viewed as an attempt to account for the transaction costs in the assessment of the profitability of straddle strategy at the earnings announcement date. In my further analysis the index would show that the corresponding price was computed as the midpoint of the bid-ask spread, while indexes and would identify ask and bid prices correspondingly.

When deciding of the time of entering the bid, one should consider the straddle characteristic described above: positive vega and negative theta. In my work I consider options with maturities that are the closest to EA for liquidity reasons. However, in this case, the option value will be subject to downward pressure due to time decay. At the same time, it will be subject to upward pressure due to increased IV in face of income disclosure. These forces compensate each other three days prior to EA and, thus, I decided to define strategy entering moment three days prior to EA.

Speaking about the time of terminating the bid, I would analyze two cases: the first one will consider the returns of the straddle when it is terminated one day before the EA while the second one would be terminated at the day on EA. As it was already shown in the literature review section, there is a specific pattern in option implied volatility around EA. Option IV increases prior to EA due to increased uncertainty surrounding EA, and sharply falls afterwards due to release of this uncertainty. It is interesting to analyze those straddle returns that are catches the unreleased uncertainty and those that do not catch. It is expected that the returns that catches the unreleased uncertainty will be higher than others.

volatility option market straddle

Estimation

Data Description.

In order to access the returns of the straddles around earnings announcement dates I used OptionMetrics database. This is a common data source since 1996 and was used in many other works. Due to the fact that my aim was to look at the trading strategy returns at the earnings announcement dates, I also gathered this information from the website earnings.com. In previous works it was noted that sometimes dates in different sources do not coincide. In order to overcome this potential problem I checked this information by gathering the same information from Bloomberg. All the dates were AMC. So that if the income disclosure date came as 25^th of January AMC, I consider 25^th of January as one day prior to the announcement, while 26^th of January as the day of the announcement.

For my work I chose four low dividend companies traded on NASDAQ: Apple Computer (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Intel Corporation (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). Choosing low dividend stocks allows us to neglect any early exercise effects and use American calls equivalently with European calls for estimation. Furthermore, we choose the U.S. stock market, because it is one of the most efficient with respect to new information and stock paths on that market at earning announcements.

The time span chosen is 01.01.2000 to 31.12.2010. To be more specific, I uploaded closing prices of the underlying assets and corresponding options. At the same time, I obtained information about date of trade, strike price, maturity date, best bid, best offer, implied volatility, vega and theta.

Moreover, I narrowed my investigation only to ATM options with the nearest maturity to earnings announcement date and require that the expiration be no more than 1 month from the income disclosure date. This requirement is important due to liquidity reason. It can be noticed that with the income disclosure date approaches the open interest and trading volume of at-the-money options increases indicating that they are intensively traded. This means that they are highly liquid and make their pricing very efficient.

Estimation Method.

Since I have four companies and 10 years, I estimated everything for each of the forty subsamples. In each subsample I have 2 scenarios concerning the termination of the position: one day prior to earnings announcement and at the income disclosure date. Moreover, I looked at the positive scenario: the investor manages to enter and terminate the position at the mid-price and negative scenario where investor enters long straddle at the highest price (offer) and terminates the position at the lowest price (bid). Negative scenario is aimed to demonstrate the situation when there are transaction costs associated with entering and execution of the strategy.

First of all, in order to enter the long straddle position, one should decide which strike to choose. In order to do this, for each company I obtain the stock price tree days before the earnings announcement. As the strike prices are standardized, I took the options with the strikes that are the closest to the price obtained. The intuition behind this is that, knowing that the volatility of the underlying increases as we are approaching EA date, the investor anticipates that the price will deviate from its level three days before the announcement.

Straddle returns for the position termination 1 day prior to EA was calculated as follows:

Scenario	Termination date	Calculations
Positive	1 day prior to EA
	at EA
Negative	1 day prior to EA
	at EA

Where - time of EA

- straddle return if the position is terminated 1 day prior to EA

- straddle return terminated at the day of EA

/- price of call 1 day prior to EA/at EA

/price of put 1 day prior to EA/at EA

- price of the call 3 days prior to EA

- price of the put 3 days prior to EA

The high index means that the price of entering long straddle and terminating it is equal to the bid-ask spread. The high index means that the option was sold at the highest level of bid-ask spread. The high index - means that investor sold the option at the lowest level of the bid-ask spread.

Returns were calculated for each quarter in each year. The results of the returns calculations can be seen in the Table 1, Table 3 and Table 4 in the Appendix.

The returns for portfolio of the four assets were calculated in a different way. If the earnings announcement dates and straddle holding period do not overlap among companies, then the return is calculated as follows:

Where

and - index for a company.

If the earnings announcement dates and holding period overlap, then the straddle return was calculated as follows:

Where

and - index for a company.

The criteria for overlapping are as follows: if earnings announcement or straddle holding period coincide at least for one day, then the returns then they coincide.

In order to evaluate whether any return can be used using straddle around EA, several criteria were used. The average return for the 11 year period was computed for each company and portfolio of four assets. In order to measure the risk adjusted return Sharpe ratio was used. It was calculated for each company and scenario as well as for the pooled returns. Sharpe ratio measures the excess return (or risk premium) per unit of deviation in an investment asset or a trading strategy, typically referred to as risk (and is a deviation risk measure), was calculated as follows:

where

- straddle return on company's ATM options,

- risk-free rate

- return on S&P500 index.

If the Sharpe ratio of the straddle strategy is higher that of S&P500, it is interpreted as strategy outperforms the market. S&P500 is used in my work as proxy for market portfolio.

It was also used to estimate the beta of straddle trading strategy. In order to get beta I run regressions of the following form:

Beta is expected to less than one and insignificantly different from zero. is expected to be significantly positive.

Empirical Results

Straddle returns.

In Table 1 the returns of the ATM straddles for each company in each year are reported. As it was already said the time span under consideration is 01.01.2000 to 31.12.2010 and strategy window was chosen to be three days. There are two cases concerning the termination of bid: “at EA” and “1 day prior to EA”. Also, there are two scenarios concerning the conditions of the bid: positive refers to entering and terminating position at the mid-price, negative refers to the situation when the bid is entered at as and terminated at offer.

Straddle returns without transaction costs.

In this section we will consider the analysis of the straddle return under positive scenario - the bid is entered and terminated at the mid-price. So, the investor manages to trade at better conditions than the market.

In Table 4, for each strategy, the quarterly return of each company was calculated as well as for the pool of these companies. I also reported average return, standard deviation, Sharpe ratio and beta of the strategy.

For the four companies a straddle strategy (-3; -1) - 1 day prior to EA - generates the following average quarterly returns: 1% (AAPL), 6% (AMD), 2.7% (INTC), 17.8% (MSFT). For the same strategy the average quarterly return of the portfolio is 13%. All these returns are positive and are higher than the average return of the S&P500 index (0.6%). To compare the risk adjusted returns, I calculated Sharpe ratios for each company and market index. The risk-free adjusted Sharpe ratios for the four companies are -0.024, 0.166, 0.063, and 0.544 respectively. The risk-free adjusted Sharpe ratio for the S&P500 index is equal 0.00083. Consequently it can be clearly seen that the risk adjusted straddle returns for all the companies except for Apple outperform that of S&P500. Sharpe ratio for the portfolio, 0.45, also outperforms that of market index. Consequently, it could be concluded that the straddle strategy outperforms the market.

In order to consider market risk, beta of trading strategy should be analyzed. It turned out that all the betas are lower than 1 and are not significantly different from zero. Thus, straddle strategy return does not depend on market risk. At the same time, constant term, which can be looked at as risk premium, is not significantly different from zero for all companies, except for the Microsoft. Its risk premium is positive and statistically different from zero. The same situation can be noticed for the pooled returns' beta. It is not statistically different from zero, while constant term is at 1% significantly positive.

If we now consider the strategy (-3; 0) - at EA termination of the bid - it will be clearly seen that three out of four companies, except for Microsoft, generate negative average returns for the period considered. The same thing can be observed when we compare the companies Sharpe ratios with that of the market portfolio. Three out of four do not outperform the market. Betas and constant terms of the straddle returns are insignificant for each of the four companies at 5% significance level. For the portfolio of the four stocks, it can be seen that average return for the period is negative. Sharpe ratio is lower than that of the market, while beta and constant terms are highly insignificant.

To sum up, the results obtained in this section are in line with what was anticipated. The returns obtained from the strategy which is terminated one day prior to EA are positive and risk-adjusted return is higher than that for the S&P500 index. At the same time, same strategy does not earn any return when terminated at EA and risk-adjusted return does not outperform the market. These results support the fact that straddles terminated 1 day prior to EA are more profitable than those terminated at EA. Thus, straddles that catch the unreleased uncertainty generate higher returns than those who do not.

Straddle Returns in presence of Transaction costs.

In this section I considered entering and terminating the bid under the worst conditions possible - entering the bid expensively, at offer price, and terminating it cheaply, at the ask price. This scenario can form understanding of whether it is possible to earn anything if accounting for the transaction costs.

Again, if we first consider the strategy (-3;-1), it can be seen that all the companies yield negative average return, except for Microsoft. The same can be noticed for the Sharpe ratios. All betas are again not statistically different from zero. The risk premium is positive and significant only for Microsoft and insignificant for other three companies. On the other hand, pooled returns generate positive average return and Shrape ratio that outperforms the market. Beta and constant term are insignificant as those at the companies' level.

The same picture could be noticed for the companies' straddle returns when the straddle is terminated at EA. Only Microsoft outperforms the market, according to Sharpe ratio. The situation for the pooled returns is different though. Average return is negative and does not outperform the market basing on the Sharpe ratio. Both, beta and constant terms are still insignificant. Comparing this strategy with that (-3; -1) one could see that (-3; 0) generates lower average returns and Sharpe ratios either at the company's or portfolio level. Which again support our expectations that terminating the bid 1 day prior to EA is relatively more profitable.

To summarize, in face of transaction costs, positive return can be earned only if using (-3;-1) strategy and only at portfolio level. However, one should understand that the conditions in this section are extremely conservative. Thus, it is likely that the average investor would be able to perform better in real conditions.

Comparison with existing literature.

As it was already mentioned in the Literature review section of my work, in January 2013 the researchers Yuhang Xing and Xiaoyan Zhang have published the work ”Anticipating Uncertainty: Straddle Around Earnings Announcements”. Though their work looks very similar to mine, the principle difference is that the authors of this research looked at the strategies terminated at the Earnings announcement date and one day after EA, while my work looked at the straddle returns one day prior to EA and at EA. This difference is crucial in face of the proved pattern in options IV around EA. The straddle returns in their work does not catch the effect of increased IV due to the fact that large part of the uncertainty surrounding EA is already released at that time.

As a result of their work they found that the straddle returns are significantly positive if the straddle is terminated at EA. This contradicts the result of my work. Even though, the time span and date coincides, Xing and Zhand looked at long-term dated straddles (24 days to 60 days to maturity). This difference can account for the differences in our results as for the longer-term straddles the time-decay effect has less downward influence on option price than for the short-term straddles. Basing on my work, the returns at EA are negative and do not outperform the market both at company's and portfolio's level. They explain the existence of these returns on the market by the investor conservatism which leads to underestimation of the uncertainty during EA.

Conclusion

There was a huge amount of work on the behavior of the option implied volatility around income disclosure events. At the same time, volatility investment strategies in general were investigated. My work lies in between of these two areas of research. The aim was to reveal, whether it is possible to earn positive returns by investing in volatility during the period when the option implied volatility pattern is predictable. The contribution of my work is in the uniqueness of the problem under investigation.

At the single company's level, it was shown that if the investor is able to operate better than the market, he can earn positive significant return using ATM straddles. It was also showed that terminating the bid 1 day prior to EA is more profitable than doing it at the day of the announcement. Moreover, the scenario accounting for the transaction costs was analyzed. Even though, in this case straddles do not earn positive returns either at EA or 1 day prior to EA, the early termination still yield higher returns and Sharpe ratios.

In the pooled returns case it was shown that the strategy generates positive returns either without transaction costs or with them if the bid is terminated one day prior to EA. In case of termination the bid at EA, the strategy does not yield the returns.

There is the possibility for further research through extending the sample under investigation. Although, Xing and Zhang showed that there are no differences between simple straddles and delta-neutral straddle, one could look for the returns on delta-neutral straddle strategy.

References

1. Ball, R. and P. Brown. «An Empirical Evaluation of Accounting Income Numbers». Journal of Accounting Research 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1968): 159-78.

2. Beaver, W. «The Information Content of Annual Earnings Announcements.» Empirical Research in Accounting: Selected Studies, 1968. Supplement to Journal of Accounting Research 6: 67-92.

3. Billings, Jennings «The Option Market Anticipation of Information Content in Earnings Announcements», 2010 Review of Accounting Studies Conference Version

4. Chiang and Chung (2012), «Insider Trading and Option Returns Around Earnings Announcements»

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6. Donders, M. and T. Vorst (1996). «The impact of firm specific news on implied volatilities.» Journal of Banking and Finance 20(9): 1447-1461

7. Donders, Monique, Roy Kouwenberg, and Ton Vorst, 2000, Options and earnings announcements: An empirical study of volatility, trading volume, open interest, and liquidity, European Finan cial Management 6, 149-172.

8. Dubinsky, Andrew and Michael Johannes, 2006, Fundamental uncertainty, earning announcements and equity options, Working paper, Columbia University

9. Euan Sinclair, «Option Trading. Pricing and Volatility Strategies and Techniques» published by John Wiley&Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey 2010

10. Felix Goltz, Wan Ni Lai Empirical Properties of Straddle Returns The Journal of Derivatives Fall 2009, Vol. 17, No. 1: pp. 38-48

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22. Yuhang Xing, Xiaoyan Zhang, «Anticipating Uncertainity: Straddles around Earnings Announcements» 2013

Appendix

Table 1. Quarterly ATM Straddle Returns

	APPL	AMD	INTC	MSFT
	At EA	1 after EA	At EA	1 after EA	At EA	1 after EA	At EA	1 afterEA
	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative
2000	13,1%	8,0%	62,8%	56,4%	-5,0%	-9,8%	-66,3%	-68,3%	22,4%	18,6%	151,3%	148,3%	53,9%	50,0%	-43,1%	-45,8%
	7,2%	6,7%	-39,8%	-42,5%	20,1%	18,3%	-27,7%	-30,1%	-4,5%	-7,8%	-66,7%	-68,1%	-13,1%	-16,0%	-5,6%	-8,6%
	-4,8%	-10,3%	-40,3%	-43,3%	-17,9%	-20,0%	-52,1%	-53,5%	-13,8%	-17,7%	-6,7%	-10,0%	-1,4%	-5,5%	55,6%	49,3%
	18,2%	8,7%	35,2%	26,1%	-17,1%	-21,3%	-48,6%	-50,6%	-1,5%	-4,5%	-40,2%	-41,8%	31,5%	24,6%	74,8%	70,8%
2001	-21,1%	-29,7%	-39,4%	-45,9%	3,1%	-5,9%	154,7%	144,1%	-14,0%	-18,2%	-29,9%	-34,5%	6,8%	0,0%	133,3%	120,5%
	-13,2%	-20,4%	16,0%	9,3%	20,3%	17,5%	34,1%	28,6%	-5,9%	-9,6%	57,4%	50,0%	138,4%	130,0%	158,7%	152,1%
	-12,0%	-16,0%	69,0%	66,0%	23,8%	16,7%	-25,7%	-31,5%	-7,2%	-10,2%	-32,0%	-34,7%	13,3%	5,1%	-68,1%	-70,3%
	-23,6%	-34,5%	-41,8%	-48,3%	-13,6%	-21,7%	-45,5%	-52,2%	-12,8%	-17,5%	-34,6%	-37,5%	15,6%	10,1%	-38,5%	-41,3%
2002	-20,5%	-25,0%	25,6%	18,8%	49,3%	41,7%	58,0%	45,8%	-26,7%	-30,4%	-33,3%	-37,0%	-30,0%	-34,4%	27,5%	22,1%
	0,0%	18,8%	-62,7%	-62,5%	100,0%	80,8%	-50,0%	-57,7%	-20,9%	-25,5%	-51,6%	-55,3%	-1,9%	-5,6%	-17,9%	-21,3%
	-28,8%	-34,1%	-3,8%	-9,8%	-16,3%	-24,0%	6,1%	2,0%	0,0%	-8,9%	-9,1%	-13,3%	-31,3%	-35,6%	-86,9%	-88,3%
	20,0%	4,5%	-7,5%	-20,5%	-24,1%	-36,7%	37,0%	18,3%	28,6%	18,2%	-6,3%	-10,6%	21,9%	18,5%	22,9%	15,7%
2003	0,0%	-13,6%	-42,5%	-54,5%	-19,4%	-29,4%	96,8%	73,5%	-5,9%	-11,1%	-56,9%	-63,0%	-35,4%	-39,2%	44,4%	38,2%
	-30,6%	-44,4%	-51,0%	-57,4%	-7,4%	-20,0%	-18,5%	-30,0%	-22,4%	-30,8%	-42,9%	-48,1%	-10,0%	-18,8%	-16,7%	-23,4%
	0,0%	-12,0%	-17,4%	-26,0%	-12,0%	-28,6%	-44,0%	-57,1%	-33,3%	-37,5%	-68,8%	-72,9%	27,5%	14,3%	-37,5%	-45,2%
	50,8%	41,2%	-52,3%	-57,4%	-23,8%	-27,3%	-95,2%	-95,5%	10,0%	3,2%	20,0%	14,5%	16,7%	10,8%	93,1%	81,1%

Table 2 Quarterly ATM Straddle Returns

	APPL	AMD	INTC	MSFT
	At EA	1 after EA	At EA	1 after EA	At EA	1 after EA	At EA	1 afterEA
	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative
2008	-11,3%	-12,3%	-4,0%	-4,7%	41,5%	36,9%	29,9%	25,6%	5,1%	2,5%	70,3%	66,5%	5,2%	2,7%	-30,2%	-31,2%
	12,9%	11,6%	-16,7%	-17,5%	-4,0%	-11,5%	-73,3%	-76,0%	54,3%	49,6%	-53,9%	-55,7%	19,3%	16,9%	-34,8%	-36,3%
	-5,1%	-6,5%	-18,1%	-19,5%	-2,3%	-7,6%	-43,0%	-47,7%	-10,3%	-13,6%	-39,3%	-42,0%	86,3%	81,1%	-39,2%	-41,6%
	-22,3%	-23,8%	-40,5%	-41,5%	-0,8%	-12,7%	-79,8%	-88,1%	12,2%	7,0%	-48,6%	-52,7%	16,3%	12,9%	12,0%	9,4%
2009	-10,0%	-10,9%	-23,3%	-24,1%	5,6%	1,6%	-2,0%	-5,5%	11,0%	5,4%	-65,4%	-69,4%	34,9%	31,0%	30,1%	27,3%
	0,0%	-1,5%	-26,9%	-28,0%	-16,8%	-22,1%	-36,8%	-40,0%	27,3%	22,8%	-35,5%	-38,2%	-1,8%	-3,0%	13,5%	12,2%
	-3,7%	-4,8%	-14,7%	-16,0%	-9,0%	-12,5%	-13,5%	-17,5%	15,3%	11,5%	118,0%	111,5%	4,5%	2,6%	6,6%	4,7%
	-4,6%	-5,4%	-17,7%	-18,5%	-7,3%	-10,7%	-49,1%	-51,8%	-1,3%	-3,4%	-26,6%	-28,4%	41,4%	39,4%	71,6%	69,4%
2010	5,8%	4,7%	-14,2%	-14,9%	-13,5%	-16,0%	3,9%	0,8%	17,7%	14,9%	-81,7%	-82,4%	2,5%	0,5%	-19,9%	-21,6%
	3,3%	1,9%	-12,2%	-12,8%	53,7%	47,6%	0,6%	-4,2%	13,2%	10,7%	49,0%	46,6%	11,1%	9,4%	-25,1%	-26,5%
	-25,7%	-26,7%	-59,9%	-60,7%	0,0%	-4,7%	-40,8%	-80,5%	29,4%	27,2%	35,8%	33,0%	5,1%	1,7%	-32,6%	-35,1%
	23,4%	20,6%	-12,8%	-15,0%	-13,4%	-20,0%	-72,2%	-77,0%	8,1%	6,5%	-55,1%	-57,0%	62,1%	55,6%	87,0%	81,7%

Table 3 Quarterly ATM Straddle Returns

Table 4 Characteristics of the Returns

	APPL	AMD	INTC	MSFT
	1 day prior to EA	at EA	1 day prior to EA	at EA	1 day prior to EA	at EA	1 day prior to EA	at EA
	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative	Positive	Negative
Avg Return	0,010	-0,035	-0,052	-0,093	0,060	-0,021	-0,137	-0,199	0,027	-0,029	-0,149	-0,192	0,178	0,127	0,131	0,081
Std Dev	0,192	0,191	0,473	0,462	0,271	0,264	0,508	0,484	0,197	0,194	0,511	0,506	0,300	0,294	0,566	0,552
Sharpe	0,053	-0,183	-0,110	-0,202	0,220	-0,079	-0,270	-0,411	0,138	-0,147	-0,291	-0,380	0,593	0,431	0,232	0,147...

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