Anticipatory effects in the FTSE 100 index revisions

This paper examines the price impact of trading due to expected changes in the FTSE 100 index composition, which employs publicly-known objective criteria to determine membership. Hence, it provides a natural context to investigate anticipatory trading effects. We propose a panel-regression event study that backs out these anticipatory effects by looking at the price impact of the ex-ante probability of changing index membership status. Our findings reveal that anticipative trading explains about 40% and 23% of the cumulative abnormal returns of additions and deletions, respectively. The results are both statistically and economically significant.