Realized annual price dispersion, trading activity, and contemporaneous price returns on the Amman Stock Exchange

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Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
This study examines how realized annual price dispersion and trading activity co-moved with 2025 price returns in the cross-section of Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) equities. The official yearly sector bulletin contains 160 valid securities; transparent activity and data-validity filters yield a 142-stock baseline sample. Cross-sectional OLS models use HC3 standard errors and are complemented by broad-sector controls, outlier-resistant estimation, alternative range scaling, sample sensitivity, signed range decomposition, and a manual corporate-action audit of extreme observations. The annual high-low range is strongly positively associated with same-year price return: its baseline coefficient is 0.883 (HC3 SE = 0.075). Scaling the range by average price leaves the coefficient positive but reduces R2 from .729 to .307. Decomposing the previous-close-scaled range produces an upside coefficient of 0.806 (SE = 0.071) and a downside coefficient of –0.630 (0.187), with equality strongly rejected (Wald χ2 = 72.61, p < .001). The extreme-observation audit identifies official 2025 capital reductions for PHNX, OFTC, NAQL, and DAFI. Excluding these four securities leaves the unsigned range coefficient positive at 0.850 (0.082; N = 138); the signed coefficients remain 0.792 (0.062) and –0.653 (0.186), respectively. Because return and range are constructed from the same annual price path, these results document robust contemporaneous directional co-movement rather than an ex-ante risk premium, causal liquidity effect, or forecasting relation.

Acknowledgments
The author thanks the Amman Stock Exchange for making public yearly trading bulletins available. Any remaining errors are the responsibility of the author.

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    • Figure 1. Realized annual range and price return in the ASE cross-section, 2025
    • Figure 2. Mean 2025 price return by realized annual range quartile
    • Table 1. Variable definitions and measurement
    • Table 2. Descriptive statistics for the 142-stock baseline sample
    • Table 3. Predictor correlation matrix and variance inflation factors
    • Table 4. Contemporaneous cross-sectional regressions of 2025 price returns
    • Table 5. Sensitivity to activity and trading-day filters
    • Table 6. Signed-range decomposition and corporate-action exclusion sensitivity
    • Table 7. Manual corporate-action audit of extreme annual range and absolute-return observations
    • Table 8. Price returns by realized annual range quartile
    • Conceptualization
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Data curation
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Formal Analysis
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Investigation
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Methodology
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Project administration
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Validation
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Visualization
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Writing – original draft
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh
    • Writing – review & editing
      Khaled Qasem Bataineh