The purpose of this paper is to study short sales trading as part of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) batch open and National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) opening cross. The paper examines whether short transactions at the open can predict future returns.
The study tests to see if short transactions in the NYSE opening batch trade and NASDAQ opening cross are informative of future returns.
It is found that a stock's opening‐trade short volume is predictive of its short volume for the rest of trading day, positively related to its previous‐day price change, and positively related to its overnight price change at the opening trade on option‐expiration Fridays when the stock is part of the Standard and Poor (S and P) 500 index.
While previous research shows that intraday short sale trades are informative, this is the first paper to examine the opening trade of the day, and whether these short sales are informative.
