The nature of informed option trading

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance grade: 8.5 (A+) Erasmus University Rotterdam (Rotterdam School of Management) language: English abstract: This thesis examines the kind of information informed traders have prior to a takeover announcement using options of target firms. I find that option liquidity rises before a takeover announcement indicating the presence of informed traders. Using 2390 M&A events I show that the implied volatility (IV) skew and the relative option-to-stock trading volume O/S predict negatively on target announcement returns but that the difference between implied volatilities of calls and puts (IV spread) has no predictive power. The main results indicate that the predictive power of these three informed option trading proxies increases if target management is entrenched and if the bidder and the target are in the same industry. I conclude that informed trading is partially driven by industry insiders with specific knowledge about the future acquisition. However the results are only significant for one or two informed option trading proxies at a time.