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The puzzle of privately-imposed price limits: are the limits imposed by financial exchanges effective?

David Reiffen and Bahattin Buyuksahin ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Some of the world’s largest futures exchanges impose daily limits on the price movements of individual contracts. Using data from three of the most active US commodity futures contracts, we show that these price restrictions are largely ineffective because traders are able to take similar positions using other contracts. When price limits become binding on the futures market, the associated (but unrestricted) options market becomes the price discovery market: much of the trading that would have occurred on the futures market migrates to the options market, and options prices accurately predict the (unconstrained) futures price the next day. We also show that the presence of options mitigates the effect of price limits on information revelation by documenting that futures markets reflect more accurate information on days following limit hits when the associated options were trading on the previous day. Overall, our evidence suggests that price limits in US futures markets have little effect on prices when options markets exist.

Keywords: Price limits; Regulatory evasion; Put-call parity; Satellite market; Price discovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G10 G13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Aestimatio 1 (2010): pp. 1-34

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