Investment strategies based on the variance risk premium

• Autor(a) principal: Nikanorova, Hanna
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/29052
• topic: Investment; Strategies; Options; Variance; Risk; Premium; Volatility; Investimentos; Estratégias; Opções; Variância; Risco; Prémio; Volatilidade; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Every option trade relies on the investor’s disbelieve about the market forecast of the underlying security price and/or volatility. In this research, we explore the employment of options as a tool to bet against expectations of future volatility. We build decile portfolios by sorting stocks on the difference between the historical and the implied volatilities – known as the Variance Risk Premium. We then build three option-based investment strategies – Straddles, Delta-Hedged Calls and Delta-Hedged Puts, whose underlying securities are stocks across the decile portfolios. We find it possible to shape profitable zero-cost investment opportunities by going long on portfolio (10), comprised of derivative securities on underlying stocks with large positive variance risk premium, and selling short portfolio (1), comprised of derivative securities on underlying stocks with large negative variance risk premium. Our study documents that such strategies yield very appealing returns and perform well in terms of risk-return trade-off measures. Although with a small exposure to the market risk factor, these returns are not explained by the industry standard risk-factors models, nor by aggregate measures of jump and volatility risk. The profitability of our strategies persists even in the presence of transaction costs, which, although negatively impact the returns, fail to deplete them entirely.