Price pressures

We study price pressures in stock prices—price deviations from fundamental value due to a risk-averse intermediary supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, twelve years of daily New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveal economically large price pressures. A $100,000 inventory shock causes an average price pressure of 0.28% with a half-life of 0.92 days. Price pressure causes average transitory volatility in daily stock returns of 0.49%. Price pressure effects are substantially larger with longer durations in smaller stocks. Theoretically, in a simple dynamic inventory model the ‘representative’ intermediary uses price pressure to control risk through inventory mean reversion. She trades off the revenue loss due to price pressure against the price risk associated with remaining in a nonzero inventory state. The model’s closed-form solution identifies the intermediary’s relative risk aversion and the distribution of investors’ private values for trading from the observed time series patterns. These allow us to estimate the social costs—deviations from constrained Pareto efficiency—due to price pressure which average 0.35 basis points of the value traded. JEL Classification: G12, G14, D53, D6

Does algorithmic trading improve liquidity?

Algorithmic trading has sharply increased over the past decade. Equity market liquidity has improved as well. Are the two trends related? For a recent five-year panel of New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks, we use a normalized measure of electronic message traffic (order submissions, cancellations, and executions) as a proxy for algorithmic trading, and we trace the associations between liquidity and message traffic. Based on within-stock variation, we find that algorithmic trading and liquidity are positively related. To sort out causality, we use the start of autoquoting on the NYSE as an exogenous instrument for algorithmic trading. Previously, specialists were responsible for manually disseminating the inside quote. As stocks were phased in gradually during early 2003, the manual quote was replaced by a new automated quote whenever there was a change to the NYSE limit order book. This market structure change provides quicker feedback to traders and algorithms and results in more message traffic. For large-cap stocks in particular, quoted and effective spreads narrow under autoquote and adverse selection declines, indicating that algorithmic trading does causally improve liquidity

Limit order books and trade informativeness

In the microstructure literature, information asymmetry is an important determinant of market liquidity. The classic setting is that uninformed dedicated liquidity suppliers charge price concessions when incoming market orders are likely to be informationally motivated. In limit order book markets, however, this relationship is less clear, as market participants can switch roles, and freely choose to immediately demand or patiently supply liquidity by submitting either market or limit orders. We study the importance of information asymmetry in limit order books based on a recent sample of thirty German DAX stocks. We find that Hasbrouck’s (1991) measure of trade informativeness Granger-causes book liquidity, in particular that required to fill large market orders. Picking-off risk due to public news induced volatility is more important for top-of-the book liquidity supply. In our multivariate analysis we control for volatility, trading volume, trading intensity and order imbalance to isolate the effect of trade informativeness on book liquidity. JEL Classification: G14 Keywords: Price Impact of Trades , Trading Intensity , Dynamic Duration Models, Spread Decomposition Models , Adverse Selection Ris

Customer flow, intermediaries, and the discovery of the equilibrium riskfree rate

Macro announcements change the equilibrium riskfree rate. We find that treasury prices reflect part of the impact instantaneously, but intermediaries rely on their customer order flow in the 15 minutes after the announcement to discover the full impact. We show that this customer flow informativeness is strongest at times when analyst forecasts of macro variables are highly dispersed. We study 30 year treasury futures to identify the customer flow. We further show that intermediaries appear to benefit from privately recognizing informed customer flow, as, in the cross-section, their own-account trade profitability correlates with access to customer orders, controlling for volatility, competition, and the announcement surprise. These results suggest that intermediaries learn about equilibrium riskfree rates through customer orders

Intraday Analysis of Market Integration: Dutch Blue Chips traded in Amsterdam and New York

Market integration is studied for Dutch stocks cross-listed at the NYSE. Trading starts in Amsterdam and ends in New York with a one-hour overlap. Both markets are not perfectly integrated in that they can be viewed as one market with the well-documented U-shape in volatility, volume and spread. Increased values for the hour of overlap suggest informed trading. Zooming in on this hour, markets are integrated in that price discovery on both sides of the Atlantic reflects the same underlying, new information. Not consistent across all stocks is the origin of this information, Amsterdam, New York or both

Are small firms really sub-optimal?: compensating factor differentials in small Dutch manufacturing firms

Onderzoek naar de vraag waarom er zoveel kleine bedrijven kunnen bestaan, ondanks de heersende opvatting dat dit bedrijven zijn die op sub-optimale schaal presteren. Kleine bedrijven blijken productiefactoren verschillend te belonen en toe te passen ten opzichte van grote bedrijven, en langs deze weg bedrijfsgroottenadelen te compenseren. Uit een steekproef onder 7.000 Nederlandse industriële bedrijven blijkt dat deze strategie van compenserende factordifferentialen toegepast wordt in Europa. Enerzijds lijkt deze strategie te leiden tot een nettoverlies voor de economie. Anderzijds suggereren de positieve relaties tussen bedrijfsleeftijd en werknemerscompensatie, en bedrijfsleeftijd en productiviteit dat er minstens een tendens is dat het inefficiënte bedrijf van vandaag het efficiënte bedrijf van de toekomst kan worden.

Competition for order flow and smart order routing systems

In this paper, the authors study the changes in liquidity following the introduction of a new electronic limit order market when, prior to its introduction, trading is centralized in a single limit order market. They also study how automation of routing decisions and trading fees affect the relative liquidity of rival markets.market fragmentation; centralized limit order book; smart routers; trading fees; trade-throughs