Intraday and Overnight Returns in the German Equity Market (PDF)

Akademische Arbeit aus dem Fachbereich BWL - Investition und Finanzierung, Universität Mannheim, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: In the first step of my analysis, I provide some descriptive statics of daily overnight and intraday returns in the German equity market. Followed by this, we will discuss evidence for differences in the return-/beta relation and make an answer to our first Hypothesis. Then we will go over to the momentum analysis and show their predictive power for momentum and reversal strategies based on overnight and intraday return signals and take a quick look on where it happens (intraday vs. overnight) like Baradehi et al. (2022) and Lou et al. (2015).

For explaining the different behavior of stock returns, we first start with the basic idea of a multiple factor model where exists multiple priced risk factors whose covariance matrix varies between the day and night. In case of different behavior of intraday and overnight returns there are existing different types of risk factors which can predict the expected stock return. To explain the relation between returns and beta we determine that the risk-return relationship is positive only during specific times, for example in January (Tinic and West, 1984), during months of low inflation (Cohen et al., 2005) or days with news about economic trends like inflation or unemployment. By looking at returns of the CDAX decomposed into its intraday and overnight returns we see a distinctively different behavior.