How does divergence of opinions affect the relative trading activity and information content in option and stock prior to takeover announcement?

•More disagreements tend to have higher option trading volume to stock trading (O/S).•Predictive powers of O/S on stock returns in higher divergence are weaker.•The greater O/S contains less information about stock price volatility.

This paper examines whether the options/stock trading volume ratio (O/S) is higher when investors’ opinions are more diverse with respect to the value of acquirer during pre-takeover announcement period and explores how divergence of opinions affects the predictive power of O/S on subsequent stock prices. We find that the coefficients of proxies for diversity of opinion are significantly positive, suggesting that more disagreements tend to have higher volumes of option trading relative to stock. Less predictive powers of O/S on subsequent stock returns are associated with larger divergence of opinion, implying that O/S contains less information about subsequent stock price movements when the divergence of opinions of acquirer firm is higher.