Allaudeen Hameed

Stock Market Declines and Liquidity

Consistent with recent theoretical models where binding capital constraints lead to sudden liquidity dry-ups, we find that negative market returns decrease stock liquidity, especially during times of tightness in the funding market. The asymmetric effect of changes in aggregate asset values on liquidity and commonality in liquidity cannot be fully explained by changes in demand for liquidity or volatility effects. We document inter-industry spill-over effects in liquidity, which are likely to arise from capital constraints in the market making sector. We also find economically significant returns to supplying liquidity following periods of large drop in market valuations. *Allaudeen Hameed and Wenjin Kang are from the Department of Finance, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. S. Viswanathan is from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. We thank Viral Acharya, Yakov Amihud, Michael Brandt, Markus Brunnermeier, Andrew Ellul, Bob Engle, Doug Foster, Joel Hasbrouck, David Hsieh, Frank de Jong, Pete Kyle, Ravi Jagannathan, Christine Parlour, David Robinson, Ioanid Rosu, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, Sheridan Titman, two anonymous referees, and participants at the NBER 2005 microstructure conference, 2007 American Finance Association meeting, 2007 European Finance Association Meeting, 2008 First Erasmus Liquidity Conference, Australian National University, Case Western Reserve University, Erasmus University, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Nanyang Technological University, National University of Singapore, New York University, Peking University, University of Alberta, University of Evry (France), University of Melbourne, and University of Texas (Austin) for their comments. Hameed and Kang acknowledge financial support from the NUS Academic Research Grants and Viswanathan thanks IIMA Bangalore for their hospitality during year 2005 when this paper was started.

Profitability of Momentum Strategies in the International Equity Markets

This paper examines the profitability of momentum strategies implemented on international stock market indices. Our results indicate statiscally significant evidence of momentum profits. The momentum profits arise mainly from time-series predictability in stock market indices—very little profit comes from predictability in the currency markets. We also find higher profits for momentum portfolios implemented on markets with higher volume in the previous period, indicating that return continuation is stronger following an increase in trading volume. This result confirms the informational role of volume and its applicability in technical analysis.

Momentum Strategies: Evidence from Pacific Basin Stock Markets

We investigate the profitability of momentum investment strategy in six Asian stock markets. Unrestricted momentum investment strategies do not yield significant momentum profits. Although we find that a diversified country-neutral strategy generates small but statistically significant returns during 1981-1994, when we control for size and turnover effects, we find that the country-neutral profits dissipate. Our evidence suggests that the factors that contribute to the momentum phenomenon in the United States are not prevalent in the Asian markets.

Asset pricing, time-varying risk premia and interest rate risk

Abstract This paper investigates the role of interest rate risk in explaining security price changes. We develop and test a two-factor linear beta pricing model of security returns in which the factors are the excess returns on the long-term, riskless bond and the equal-weighted equity market index. We find that time-variation in the interest rate and market risk premia influence expected security returns. Furthermore, conditional interest rate volatility affects security returns, particularly during periods of substantial interest rate movements.

Trading volume and short-horizon contrarian profits: Evidence from the Malaysian market

Abstract We provide evidence on short-term predictability of stock returns on the Malaysian stock market. We examine the relation between return predictability and the level of trading activity. This is particularly relevant in emerging stock markets, where thin trading is more pervasive. We find that the returns from a contrarian portfolio strategy are positively related to the level of trading activity in the securities. Specifically, the contrarian profits on actively and frequently traded securities are significantly higher than that generated from the low trading activity securities. We find that the differential behavior of high- and low-volume securities is not subsumed by the size effect, although for the small firms, the volume–predictability relation is most pronounced. We also suggest that the price patterns may be related to the institutional arrangement in the Malaysian stock market.

The Effect of Tick Size on Price clustering and Trading Volume

Proposals have been made for some stock exchanges to reduce the size of their trading tick in order to lower transactions costs and, as a result, attract more trading volume and firm listings. We investigate the impact of tick size on price clustering and trading volume when the minimum price change varies with price level. Controlling the firm specific variables, we find that a smaller trading tick tends to exacerbate price clustering. Furthermore, a reduction in tick size is more likely to increase trading volume if the shares are heavily traded. These results suggest that previous studies on other stock markets may have overstated the benefits of a smaller trading tick to traders. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.

Industries and Stock Return Reversals

This paper documents strong and pervasive evidence of intra-industry return reversals. The intra-industry reversals are stronger in magnitude (about 1.5 percent a month), robust to adjustments to market microstructure biases and common risk factors, and more pervasive across stocks, including large, liquid and low volatility stocks. Stocks that experience a decrease in turnover, size or liquidity exhibit greater reversals – indicating a significant role for liquidity and liquidity risk factors. We also identify across-industry momentum in prices that is independent of the within industry reversals. A return-based trading strategy that capitalizes on the inter-industry momentum and intra-industry reversals produces a monthly, risk-adjusted return of 2 percent. The inter-industry momentum appears to be linked to slow diffusion of industry-wide information.

Stock Price Synchronicity and Liquidity

We argue and provide evidence that stock price synchronicity affects stock liquidity. Under the relative synchronicity hypothesis, higher return co-movement (i.e., higher systematic volatility relative to total volatility) improves liquidity. Under the absolute synchronicity hypothesis, stocks with higher systematic volatility or beta are more liquid. Our results support both hypotheses. We find all three illiquidity measures (effective proportional bid-ask spread, price impact measure, and Amihuds illiquidity measure) are negatively related to stock return co-movement and systematic volatility. Our analysis also shows that larger industry-wide component in returns improves liquidity. We find that improvement in liquidity following additions to the S&P 500 Index is related to the stocks increase in return co-movement.

Underpricing and Firm Quality in Initial Public Offerings: Evidence from Singapore

Firms seeking initial public listings on the Stock Exchange of Singapore can choose between offering their shares at a fixed price or selling them in two tranches: the first tranche is offered at a fixed price while the issue price of the second tranche is determined via a tender system. Consistent with the existing signalling literature, tendering IPO firms underprice their fixed price tranche more than non-tendering IPO firms. The underpricing in the fixed tranche is recouped through higher proceeds from the tender tranche. Our evidence suggests that IPO firms use the tender option to signal superior firm quality. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998.

Time-Varying Liquidity and Momentum Profits

A basic intuition is that arbitrage is easier when markets are most liquid. Surprisingly, we find that momentum profits are markedly larger in liquid market states. This finding is not explained by variation in liquidity risk, time-varying exposure to risk factors, or changes in macroeconomic condition, cross-sectional return dispersion, and investor sentiment. The predictive performance of aggregate market illiquidity for momentum profits uniformly exceeds that of market return and market volatility states. While momentum strategies have been unconditionally unprofitable in the United States, in Japan, and in the Eurozone countries in the last decade, they are substantial following liquid market states.