Thursday, May 24, 2007

What I have done so far

With my topic (An empirical analysis on the supply of liquidity be retail and institutional investors in options markets) now approved by both the Engineering and Finance department I have started to reseach the topic. I have currently found about 15 papers in the Journal of Finance and The Journal of financial economics that are of relevance. I have generally been looking for papers that refer to trading behaviour of retail and institutional investors, and conditions under which they may provide more liquidity. To my knowledge this topic has no published articles on it so accordingly it is difficult to find published papers on the conditions for providing liquidity in options markets, however information on the conditions for liquidity in futures markets has been found.
I will also need to do some data amalysis, and regression models for this thesis, as a result I attended a SAS workshop yesterday as I feel this is the best software to use. While I have programming skills in many languages I am unfamiliar with this syntax and found these very useful.