Because the market return, average variance, and average skewness are constructed as cross-sectional moments of daily returns, they are likely to exhibit contemporaneous correlation. Table 1 (Panel B) reveals that the relation between the market return and average variance and skewness are very different. The average variance is negatively correlated with the market return ( and for the value-weighted and equal-weighted variance, respectively), and the contemporaneous correlation between the market return and average skewness is positive (9.3% and 14.4% for the value-weighted and equal-weighted skewness, respectively). This positive contemporaneous correlation between the cross-sectional mean and the cross-sectional skewness of a variable has to be expected in finite samples when the cross-sectional distribution of the variable is non-normal (see Bryan and Cecchetti, 1999). This high correlation exists even with no time dependence in the data and therefore provides no indication of a correlation between the market return and lagged skewness.The correlation between the market return in month and the average variance or skewness in month t is of a different nature because it involves the time dependence in the return process. The table shows that, as in the contemporaneous case, the correlation of the market return with lagged average variance is negative ( and for the value-weighted and equal-weighted variance, respectively). In contrast to the contemporaneous case, the correlation with lagged average skewness is negative ( and for the value-weighted and equal-weighted skewness, respectively), suggesting that average skewness can negatively predict market return.The table also reveals that the correlation between the market skewness and average skewness is relatively low (50.2% and 26.7% for the value-weighted and equal-weighted measures, respectively). These numbers confirm that the market skewness and average skewness convey different types of information, as illustrated in Fig. 2. Market skewness is mainly driven by coskewness terms, which reflect nonlinear dependencies between firms’ returns and does not depend on average skewness when the number of firms is large (see Technical Appendix Section A.2 for details).