Download or read book The Intraday Behaviour of Quoted and Effective Bid-Ask Spreads of Ft-Se 100 Index Options written by Paul Dawson and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study compares the intraday patterns observed in the quoted and effective bid-ask spreads on the FT-SE 100 index options traded on LIFFE with a broad range of theoretical models. Several discrepancies are found. It is argued that these arise principally because the standard classification of investors into informed and liquidity traders breaks down in the case of index options, in part, because options are inappropriate instruments for liquidity traders, and also because the concept of an informed trader has a rather different nature in the case of an index as contrasted with an individual stock. Furthermore, marketmakers in these options have access to a liquid instrument to hedge the risk of asymmetric information. The key empirical finding is that there is a significant contraction of both the quoted and effective bid-ask spreads after the first 25 minutes of the trading day. Subsequently, there is little systematic intraday change in either kind of spread. This contraction is only partially consistent with theory. This study finds a widening only at the beginning of the day, and no evidence of informed trading is found during the opening interval. Is there an optimum time during the course of the day for investors to buy and sell options? The conclusion reached is that there is no such optimum time, but that investors should avoid the opening period of the day, since both the quoted and effective spreads are significantly larger than those at other times, with no compensating reward in the form of more informative prices.