Recent Overnight-Intraday Stock Return Correlations

Do intraday U.S. stock returns still tend to reverse preceding overnight returns as found in prior research? In their August 2018 paper entitled “Overnight Return, the Invisible Hand Behind The Intraday Return? A Retrospective”, Ben Branch and Aixin Ma revisit prior research on the relationship between overnight and intraday returns of U.S. stocks. Specifically, they relate average intraday stock returns to preceding average overnight returns based on: (1) whether average overnight returns are positive or negative; and, (2) by ranked fourths (quartiles) of average overnight returns. They perform a separate regression analysis to isolate correlation effects among overnight, intraday and one-leg lagged overnight and intraday returns. Using daily open-to-close and close-to-open returns for a broad sample of U.S. stocks during January 2011 through December 2017, they find that: (more…)