Standard option pricing models, such as the Black-Scholes model and binomial model, assume perfect capital markets, a martingale diffusion process for underlying asset returns and replicability of option payoffs using the underlying asset and the risk-free asset. Under these assumptions, options are priced by disallowing arbitrage opportunities. Hence, standard models predict that only six factors enter into the option pricing formulas: the price of the underlying asset, exercise price, time to maturity, risk-free interest rate, volatility and dividends on the underlying asset. Other factors which may affect the price of the underlying asset, such as expected future stock returns and investors’ preferences about the higher moments of the underlying asset return distributions, are not priced.
However, when the perfect market assumption is relaxed, it becomes difficult to replicate option payoffs. Consequently, option prices can deviate from the prices of the replicating portfolios, and to some extent, become non-redundant securities [Figlewski (1989), Figlewski and Webb (1993) and Grossman (1995)]. Prices of the non-redundant securities are then determined both by the supply and demand for these securities as well as limited arbitrage considerations in imperfect markets. This approach opens up the possibility that additional factors could enter into option pricing. Specifically, stock market momentum can change investors’ risk aversion and their perceptions about the mean, volatility, or the higher moments of the underlying stock market return distribution and thereby affect the supply and demand for options. In this paper, we test the predictions of the standard option pricing models that there should be no relation between the option prices and the stock market momentum.