Since my last entry I completed my project plan which outlined the tasks required and expected time to complete them. I have also completed my draft litereature review and introduction. I have sent these to my finance supervisor whom I will meet and discuss my work with this Tuesday. I will also discuss my data, I have been told it is currently being processed and should be avaiable shortly.

I have now done more work on my literature review, I just returned from a week's holiday so did not do quite as much as I had intended. As a result I will focus on doing my literature review and project plan over the next week and will hopefully start working on my data next week.

Since my last entry I have started my literature review. I have now written about 2500 words. I am also finding more relevant papers as I write my review. This is because papers that I found in relevant journal have references to more papers. As a result I now have a large source of papers and a lot more reading ahead of me. I hope to be close to finishing my literature review within a fortnight and to have started working on my data and necessary models.

My exams are now finished and I am once again working on my thesis. I have been looking for more papers, but I'm beginning to find relevant papers harder to find. I will hopefully spend today as my last day searching for papers and will then begin working on my literature review. I have also determined the models and methods required for this thesis. Accordingly some programming and data manipulation will be done to perform a series of different regression models on the data in order to determine what factors and market conditions provide (demand) liquidity in options markets.

Since my last post I have attended two more SAS workshops and should hopefully have learnt enough syntax for the programming required to do my thesis. I have also spoken to my Finance Supervisor about obtaining the data required and this is all under control. The final thing I have done is found one more paper (by chance) that is relative to my topic. I have not been hugely focused on my thesis at present as I have had alot of major assignments due, and with a majority of these now out of the way I will now be focusing on my final exams for the next few weeks.

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.