161,087 research outputs found

    Insider trading: regulation, securities markets, and welfare under risk neutrality

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    I evaluate in this paper the impact of insider trading regulation (ITR) on a securities market and on social welfare. I show that ITR has both beneficial and detrimental effects on a securities market. In terms of welfare, I show that ITR has a purely redistributive effect; that is, it generates trading gains and trading losses that cancel out at the aggregate level. However, the goods and services that could have been produced with the resources allocated to enforce such a wealth redistribution are a net social cost of restricting insider trading. Finally, although I establish two conditions under which ITR is beneficial, I argue that neither condition provides sufficient support to the imposition of such a regulation

    Bullish-Bearish strategies of trading: A non-linear equilibrium.

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    In this paper, we study a financial market where risk neutral traders are endowed with a signal which is perfectly revealing of the direction (but not the exact amount) of the liquidation value of a normally distributed risky asset. This type of information is known as bullish or bearish. When the signal is positive (negative) the traders buy (sell) the asset. This type of information is different with the type of information which is classically considered in the literature where informed traders are endowed with a perfect or a noisy signal. In this model, since the optimal trading strategy is not linear, the pricing schedule is also a non-linear function of the volumes. The main results are the following i) the price function is a non-linear Sigmo¨ıd-shaped function. ii) A monopolistic bullish-bearish type trader makes nearly thirty six percent of the profits she would have made with a perfect signal in a linear model `a la Kyle (1985). iii) In the presence of competition, the market reveals his private information quicker than in a noisy informed strategic oligopoly. Moreover, liquidity is no longer a monotonic increasing function of the number of competitors

    Probability of informed trading and volatility for an ETF

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    We use the new procedure developed by Easley et al. to estimate the Probability of Informed Trading (PIN), based on the volume imbalance: Volume-Synchronized Probability of Informed Trading (VPIN). Unlike the previous method, this one does not require the use of numerical methods to estimate unobservable parameters. We also relate the VPIN metric to volatility measures. However, we use most efficient estimators of volatility which consider the number of jumps. Moreover, we add the VPIN to a Heterogeneous Autoregressive model of Realized Volatility to further investigate its relation with volatility. For the empirical analysis we use data on the exchange traded fund (SPY)

    Econometric analysis of financial trade processes by discrete mixture duration models

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    We propose a new framework for modelling the time dependence in duration processes being in force on financial markets. The pioneering ACD model introduced by Engle and Russell (1998) will be extended in a manner that the duration process will be accompanied by an unobservable stochastic process. The Discrete Mixture ACD framework provides us with a general methodology which puts the idea into practice. It is established by introducing a discrete-valued latent regime variable which can be justified in the light of recent market microstructure theories. The empirical application demonstrates its ability to capture specific characteristics of intraday transaction durations while alternative approaches fail. JEL classification: C41, C22, C25, C51, G14

    Incentive-compatible contracts for the sale information

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    An informed financial institution can trade on private information and also sell it to clients through a managed fund. To provide an incentive for the informed agent to trade in the interest of her client, the optimal contract requires that she be compensated as an increasing function of the profits of the fund. The optimal contract is also designed to limit the aggressiveness of the sum of the fund's trade and the proprieatary trade. This reduces information revelation and thes leads to greater overall trading profits than if the informed agent only conducted proprietary trades

    How markets slowly digest changes in supply and demand

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    In this article we revisit the classic problem of tatonnement in price formation from a microstructure point of view, reviewing a recent body of theoretical and empirical work explaining how fluctuations in supply and demand are slowly incorporated into prices. Because revealed market liquidity is extremely low, large orders to buy or sell can only be traded incrementally, over periods of time as long as months. As a result order flow is a highly persistent long-memory process. Maintaining compatibility with market efficiency has profound consequences on price formation, on the dynamics of liquidity, and on the nature of impact. We review a body of theory that makes detailed quantitative predictions about the volume and time dependence of market impact, the bid-ask spread, order book dynamics, and volatility. Comparisons to data yield some encouraging successes. This framework suggests a novel interpretation of financial information, in which agents are at best only weakly informed and all have a similar and extremely noisy impact on prices. Most of the processed information appears to come from supply and demand itself, rather than from external news. The ideas reviewed here are relevant to market microstructure regulation, agent-based models, cost-optimal execution strategies, and understanding market ecologies.Comment: 111 pages, 24 figure

    Centralized vs Decentralized Markets in the Laboratory: The Role of Connectivity

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    This paper compares the performance of centralized and decentralized markets experimentally. We constrain trading exchanges to happen on an exogenously predetermined network, representing the trading relationships in markets with differing levels of connectivity. Our experimental results show that, despite having lower trading volumes, decentralized markets are generally not less efficient. Although information can propagate quicker through highly connected markets, we show that higher connectivity also induces informed traders to trade faster and exploit further their information advantages before the information becomes fully incorporated into prices. This not only reduces market efficiency, but it increases wealth inequality. We show that, in more connected markets, informed traders trade not only relatively quicker, but also more, in the right direction, despite not doing it at better prices

    The use of the comprehensive family of distributions for the regime switching ACD framework

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    In recent methodological work the well known ACD approach, originally introduced by Engle and Russell (1998), has been supplemented by the involvement of an unobservable stochastic process which accompanies the underlying process of durations via a discrete mixture of distributions. The Mixture ACD model, emanating from the specialized proposal of De Luca and Gallo (2004), has proved to be a moderate tool for description of financial duration data. The use of one and the same family of ordinary distributions has been common practice until now. Our contribution incites to use the rich parameterized comprehensive family of distributions which allows for interacting different distributional idiosyncrasies. JEL classification: C41, C22, C25, C51, G14
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