Mini options are specially catered to retail investors with limited capital for trading options on extremely high-priced securities. The coexistence of both Mini and standard options for the same underlying security provides us a novel setting to investigate whether and how small retail investors use derivatives contracts differently compared to their counterparts. First, we find that the Mini option investors are more subject to constraints of limited attention. Specifically, Mini option investors trade more intensively near market opens, and their trading activities are more heavily influenced by attention-grabbing events and attention-distracting events. Second, we document that Mini option investors’ trading is more likely to be driven by market sentiment than standard option investors. Third, the trading performance of Mini option investors is also worse than that of standard option investors, with less positive intraday returns and more negative overnight returns.

迷你期权专为资本有限的散户投资者提供交易极高价证券的期权。同一标的证券的迷你期权和标准期权的共存为我们提供了一个新的环境，以调查小型散户投资者是否以及如何以与其同行相比不同的方式使用衍生品合约。首先，我们发现迷你期权投资者更容易受到有限注意力的约束。具体而言，迷你期权投资者在开市前交易更加密集，其交易活动受吸引注意力事件和分散注意力事件的影响较大。其次，我们记录了迷你期权投资者的交易比标准期权投资者更可能受到市场情绪的驱动。第三，