IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rut/rutres/200224.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

When Did The Smart Money in Enron Lose Its' Smirk?

Author

Listed:
  • Bruce Mizrach

    (Rutgers University)

Abstract

The Enron Corporation went from a $65 billion dollar market capitalization to bankruptcy in just 16 months. Using statistical techniques for extracting the implied probability distributions built into option prices, I examine the market's expectation of Enron's risk of collapse. I find that the "smart money" remained far too optimistic about the stock until just weeks before their bankruptcy filing.

Suggested Citation

  • Bruce Mizrach, 2002. "When Did The Smart Money in Enron Lose Its' Smirk?," Departmental Working Papers 200224, Rutgers University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:rut:rutres:200224
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sas.rutgers.edu/virtual/snde/wp/2002-24.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Yacine Aït-Sahalia & Andrew W. Lo, "undated". "Nonparametric Estimation of State-Price Densities Implicit in Financial Asset Prices," CRSP working papers 332, Center for Research in Security Prices, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago.
    2. Bjerksund, Petter & Stensland, Gunnar, 1993. "Closed-form approximation of American options," Scandinavian Journal of Management, Elsevier, vol. 9(Supplemen), pages 87-99.
    3. Bates, David S, 1991. "The Crash of '87: Was It Expected? The Evidence from Options Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(3), pages 1009-1044, July.
    4. Kuldeep Shastri & Kulpatra Wethyavivorn, 1987. "The Valuation Of Currency Options For Alternate Stochastic Processes," Journal of Financial Research, Southern Finance Association;Southwestern Finance Association, vol. 10(4), pages 283-293, December.
    5. Das, Sanjiv Ranjan & Sundaram, Rangarajan K., 1999. "Of Smiles and Smirks: A Term Structure Perspective," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 34(2), pages 211-239, June.
    6. Heston, Steven L, 1993. "A Closed-Form Solution for Options with Stochastic Volatility with Applications to Bond and Currency Options," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 6(2), pages 327-343.
    7. Christoffersen, Peter F, 1998. "Evaluating Interval Forecasts," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 39(4), pages 841-862, November.
    8. Jackwerth, Jens Carsten & Rubinstein, Mark, 1996. "Recovering Probability Distributions from Option Prices," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 51(5), pages 1611-1632, December.
    9. Peter Christoffersen & Kris Jacobs, 2001. "The Importance of the Loss Function in Option Pricing," CIRANO Working Papers 2001s-45, CIRANO.
    10. Barone-Adesi, Giovanni & Whaley, Robert E, 1987. "Efficient Analytic Approximation of American Option Values," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 42(2), pages 301-320, June.
    11. Hansen Bruce E., 1997. "Inference in TAR Models," Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics & Econometrics, De Gruyter, vol. 2(1), pages 1-16, April.
    12. repec:bla:jfinan:v:53:y:1998:i:2:p:499-547 is not listed on IDEAS
    13. Bates, David S., 2000. "Post-'87 crash fears in the S&P 500 futures option market," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 94(1-2), pages 181-238.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Haas, Markus & Mittnik, Stefan & Mizrach, Bruce, 2006. "Assessing central bank credibility during the ERM crises: Comparing option and spot market-based forecasts," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 28-54, April.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Haas, Markus & Mittnik, Stefan & Mizrach, Bruce, 2006. "Assessing central bank credibility during the ERM crises: Comparing option and spot market-based forecasts," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 2(1), pages 28-54, April.
    2. Bruce Mizrach, 2006. "The Enron Bankruptcy: When did the options market in Enron lose it’s smirk?," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 27(4), pages 365-382, December.
    3. Christoffersen, Peter & Jacobs, Kris & Chang, Bo Young, 2013. "Forecasting with Option-Implied Information," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 581-656, Elsevier.
    4. Chateau, J. -P. & Dufresne, D., 2002. "The stochastic-volatility American put option of banks' credit line commitments:: Valuation and policy implications," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 159-181.
    5. Guidolin, Massimo & Timmermann, Allan, 2003. "Option prices under Bayesian learning: implied volatility dynamics and predictive densities," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 27(5), pages 717-769, March.
    6. Jingzhi Huang & Liuren Wu, 2004. "Specification Analysis of Option Pricing Models Based on Time- Changed Levy Processes," Finance 0401002, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Robert Tompkins, 2001. "Implied volatility surfaces: uncovering regularities for options on financial futures," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(3), pages 198-230.
    8. Tao Li, 2013. "Investors' Heterogeneity and Implied Volatility Smiles," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(10), pages 2392-2412, October.
    9. Peter Carr & Liuren Wu, 2014. "Static Hedging of Standard Options," Journal of Financial Econometrics, Oxford University Press, vol. 12(1), pages 3-46.
    10. Chang, Eric C. & Ren, Jinjuan & Shi, Qi, 2009. "Effects of the volatility smile on exchange settlement practices: The Hong Kong case," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(1), pages 98-112, January.
    11. Christoffersen, Peter & Heston, Steve & Jacobs, Kris, 2006. "Option valuation with conditional skewness," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 131(1-2), pages 253-284.
    12. Ait-Sahalia, Yacine & Duarte, Jefferson, 2003. "Nonparametric option pricing under shape restrictions," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 116(1-2), pages 9-47.
    13. Du Du & Dan Luo, 2019. "The Pricing of Jump Propagation: Evidence from Spot and Options Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(5), pages 2360-2387, May.
    14. Hsuan-Chu Lin & Ren-Raw Chen & Oded Palmon, 2016. "Explaining the volatility smile: non-parametric versus parametric option models," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 46(4), pages 907-935, May.
    15. David S. Bates, 1995. "Testing Option Pricing Models," NBER Working Papers 5129, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    16. Gabriele Fiorentini & Angel León & Gonzalo Rubio, "undated". "Short-term options with stochastic volatility: Estimation and empirical performance," Studies on the Spanish Economy 02, FEDEA.
    17. Peng Cheng & Olivier Scaillet, 2002. "Linear-Quadratic Jump-Diffusion Modeling with Application to Stochastic Volatility," FAME Research Paper Series rp67, International Center for Financial Asset Management and Engineering.
    18. Carol Alexander & Emese Lazar, 2009. "Modelling Regime‐Specific Stock Price Volatility," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 71(6), pages 761-797, December.
    19. Marie Briere, 2006. "Market Reactions to Central Bank Communication Policies :Reading Interest Rate Options Smiles," Working Papers CEB 38, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    20. Lin, Yueh-Neng & Lin, Anchor Y., 2016. "Using VIX futures to hedge forward implied volatility risk," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 43(C), pages 88-106.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Enron; implied probability distributions; options;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G13 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Contingent Pricing; Futures Pricing

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rut:rutres:200224. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/derutus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.