Best paper award for retail options trading study

The winning paper looked at how such platforms have attracted millions of new investors by reducing transaction costs, but also how the automatic liquidation of option positions often results in bursts of trading shortly before the market close. 

“These trades face adverse execution and impact the prices of underlying equities and the aggregate stock market as market makers adjust their delta hedges,” the paper says. “Our findings indicate that platform design can synchronise retail investor trading activity and transform dispersed trading activity into concentrated sources of order flow that have important impacts on market prices.” 

The winning paper, titled ‘Robinhood’s Forced Liquidations’, was authored by Pedro Angel Garcia-Ares of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), Diego Amaya of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, Aurelio Vasquez of ITAM and Neil D. Pearson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Expanding collaboration to support early-career researchers in asset management 

The event in Madrid was part of an ongoing collaboration between CEAM and the Financial Management Association (FMA) International, which began in 2019. The annually hosted Consortium on Asset Management is designed to support early-career researchers in asset management, and the 2026 edition marked an important development as the collaboration expanded to include a third partner, CUNEF Universidad in Madrid. 

This reflects the growing reach and strength of the consortium, as well as our shared commitment to supporting early-career researchers in the field.

Oğuzhan Karakaş, Professor of Finance at Cambridge Judge and Co-Director of CEAM

The next event will be held in St. John’s College, Cambridge, on 15 April 2027. 

The consortium is jointly supported by 4 co-chairs: 

The Consortium is designed for European finance faculty working on research in asset management and related areas, with priority given to scholars who have completed their PhDs within the last five years. The goal of the consortium is to support and develop junior scholars by bringing together emerging researchers in asset management, fostering interaction among peers and facilitating engagement with more senior faculty and practitioners. 

Prior winning papers looked at issues such as option return momentum and stocks with high ESG scores 

Among previous winning papers at the Consortium’s annual event: 

2025

The winning paper, ‘MiFID II research unbundling: cross-border impact on asset managers’, examined MiFID II, which requires EU-based asset managers to separate payments for research from execution costs in trading commissions. The paper modelled the impact of unbundling on asset managers and investors to find that the regulation “provides global asset managers with a ‘pecuniary incentive’ to use non-EU client commissions to subsidise the cost of European research”. 

2024

The winning paper, ‘A new option momentum: the role of the systematic component’, decomposed option returns, finding that the systematic component exhibits stronger momentum that leads to an option return momentum strategy that “significantly outperforms traditional option momentum and option factor momentum”. 

2023

There were 2 winning papers in 2023. The first winning paper, ‘Back to the roots: ancestral origin and portfolio preferences of professional investors’, identified a negative causal effect of corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance on short-selling demand among overpriced stocks. It found that the shorting of overpriced stocks with high ESG scores is exposed to higher synchronisation and short-squeeze risks, as well as ESG reputation risks posed by short sellers who publicly disclose large positions on high ESG stocks. The second winning paper, ‘Green or brown: which overpriced stock to short sell?’, showed how the ancestry of US equity mutual fund managers affects portfolio decisions, as funds overweight stocks from their managers’ ancestral home countries in their non-US portfolio.