Blogs

Futures: Not All Price Series Are the Same!
October 1, 2024

If you are trading futures, you should know something important. Continuous futures price series may vary between sources and cause misleading analysis. The culprit here is how the various contract months, each with a different price and expiration, are combined ...

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Verizon’s Dividend Paradox: The Premium Puzzle in Implied Yields
September 26, 2024

Verizon Communications (VZ) stands as a paragon of dividend reliability, boasting over two decades of consistent payouts and regular increases—a veritable magnet for income-focused investors.  The introduction of OptionMetrics’ IvyDB Implied Dividend offers insight into the options market's perception of ...

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How to Predict Dividend Cuts and Raises: The Options Market Approach
August 20, 2024

Lance Zhao, OptionMetrics Garrett DeSimone, PhD, OptionMetrics   Introduction Dividends are crucial in stock investment, providing regular income and indicating a company’s financial health. Our event study on dividend announcements shows that stocks with increased dividends generally yield higher returns, ...

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Commodities Told the Tale
August 13, 2024

The recent sharp declines in the equity markets, marking the most significant flight to safety since the 2020 pandemic, likely came as no surprise to any investor following commodity markets. Since mid-2022, commodity prices have been in a sideways to ...

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Dividend Risk Premium: A Primer
July 31, 2024

How do investors price dividend uncertainty, known as the dividend risk premium, into equities and ETFs? This is something that can now be more easily and accurately assessed using OptionMetrics’ new IvyDB Implied Dividend. Implied dividends are risk-neutral dividends derived ...

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Volmageddon Unveiled: How Massive Options Trades May Have Enabled Historic VIX Spike
July 1, 2024

By: Garrett DeSimone, PhD & Oscar Shih Intro and background After 25 years in business, OptionMetrics has experienced many different markets and various volatility regimes. In recognition, we look back at the single biggest daily increase of the VIX, commonly ...

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Negative Futures Prices: A Failure of Imagination
June 28, 2024

OptionMetrics is now 25 years old! In celebration of the event, I was asked to comment on which market-related event most influenced me since the company's founding in 1999. 25 years is a long time, and most of the significant ...

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Commodities: Disparate Trends
May 28, 2024

Short term commodity price developments are in disagreement with longer term market-based forecasts. Although this is often the case, as markets are buffeted by short term events that aren't necessarily related to long term factors, the current disparity seems glaringly ...

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Another GME Rally: Diagnosing the Boom and Bust
May 21, 2024

Last week’s random meme stock resurgence put another wet blanket on the efficient market hypothesis. The catalyst for this latest run was a Sunday night tweet from one of the original characters of the OG meme stock craze of '21, ...

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