Is Off–Board Trading Detrimental to Market Liquidity?

Dual trading can have opposite effects: although competition between markets should induce dealers to offer cheaper transactions, market fragmentation could reduce market activity, liquidity, and exchange efficiency. This paper shows that for French stocks traded on the London Stock Exchange's SEAQ International (SEAQ–I), market activity decreases significantly in the Paris Bourse during UK bank holidays. Thus, SEAQ–I market makers seem to divert a new clientele to the Paris Bourse, increasing both market activity and the breadth of the Bourse's order book. Also, contrary to the fragmentation hypothesis, dual trading does not seem to increase information asymmetry.     

A Specialist's Quoted Depth and the Limit Order Book

By partitioning quoted depth into the specialist's contribution and the limit order book's contribution, the paper investigates whether specialists manage quoted depth to reduce adverse selection risk. The results show that both specialists and limit order traders reduce depth around information events, thereby reducing their exposure to adverse selection costs. Moreover, specialists' quotes may reflect only the limit order book on the side (or sides) of the market where they believe there is a chance of informed trading. Changes in quoted depth are consistent with specialists managing their inventory as well as having knowledge of the stock's future value.     

The Effect of Crossing‐Network Trading on Dealer Market's Bid‐Ask Spreads

This article provides new insights into market competition between traditional exchanges and alternative trading systems in Europe. It investigates the relationship between the trading activity of a crossing network (CN) and the liquidity of a traditional dealer market (DM) by comparing data from the SEAQ quote‐driven segment of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) and internal data from the POSIT crossing network. A cross‐sectional analysis of bid‐ask spreads shows that DM spreads are negatively related to CN executions. Risk‐sharing benefits from CN trading dominate fragmentation and cream‐skimming costs. Further, risk‐sharing gains are found to be related to dealer trading in the CN.     

Trade size clustering and the cost of trading at the London Stock Exchange

For the London Stock Exchange, this paper investigates differences in trading costs between market maker (off-book) and order book trades, in the context of clustering in trade sizes and prices. We report several substantial findings. Even after controlling for differences in trade size, the realised spread measure is lower for off-book trades. For the order book, trade size clustering is not associated with differences in transaction costs nor with differences in the information content of trades. For the off-book market, trades in clustered (popular) sizes carry significantly more information than non-clustered trades. Despite the significant differences in the price impact estimates between the order book and off-book, we show that traders placing large orders off-book are still better off than trading via the order book as they benefit from a large discount from the current midpoint price. Additionally, we highlight that price and size clustering tend to occur simultaneously rather than being substitutes in this market setting.     

The Diversion of Order Flow on French Stocks from CAC to SEAQ International: a Field Study

The competition between SEAQ International and Continental European equity markets to attract transactions in the most actively traded European stocks has intensified since the late 1980s. Because their transactions are organised in a different manner, and because reporting standards are not the same, comparisons of official transaction volumes from SEAQ International and the French CAC market system are misleading. The objective of this paper is to scrutinise the order flow for French stocks and the reporting procedures on both market systems, so as to ascertain the effective transactions on each market and estimate actual market shares. Based on both the observation of official statistics and a field study of order flows conducted among five large and active brokerage houses with a book on both markets, SEAQI's market share in French stocks as reported in previous studies using only official volume statistics seems largely overstated.     

全球股票市场交易费用变动趋势研究

各国证券交易所为提高市场质量和增强国际竞争力,进行了股票市场交易费用结构与费率的频繁调整。本文首先总结了美国、英国、日本、香港等国家和地区交易所现行交易费用的结构特征,并以纽约证券交易所和伦敦证券交易所为案例估算了交易费率的调整比率。其次,本文运用2002年至2010年期间主要海外证券交易所的财务数据和市场数据,分析交易费用变动与交易所经营业绩的互动关系。最后,我们对欧美市场交易费用的大幅下调进行了成因分析,并探讨我国证券交易所内外部环境及经营特点与海外市场存在的差异,提出相关启示和思考。     

The Market Quality of Dealer versus Hybrid Markets: The Case of Moderately Liquid Securities

Abstract:  Over the last decade, electronic limit-order trading systems have been sweeping securities exchanges around the world. This paper studies a transitional case, namely, the commencement of trading of a group of moderately liquid stocks on SETS of the London Stock Exchange. The evidence reveals that the liquidity of those stocks dropped substantially after the introduction of the limit order book and the removal of the market makers' obligations. This transition provides an example that a hybrid market with a limit order book and voluntary dealers may not perform as well as a dealership market with obligatory market makers.     

The value of information in cross-listing

Until 2004, the London Stock Exchange allowed firms to be traded in the specialized SEAQ-I platform without the firm's involvement. Trading only required an application by one LSE trading member firm. Such an institutional arrangement, which made cross-listings possible without a firms' approval, allows for a direct test of different theories of foreign listing. In particular, we can differentiate between market segmentation and liquidity hypotheses, which rely on a firm trading in a foreign exchange and informational hypotheses, which assume that a firm makes the decision to trade in a foreign exchange. We identify a sample of international firms that are admitted to trading on London's SEAQ-I platform without their involvement. We estimate the valuation effects of this multi-market trading event and compare them to those enjoyed by firms that pursue a standard London Stock Exchange cross-listing. A cross-sectional abnormal returns analysis documents significant evidence in support of information-related hypotheses of cross-listing. An analysis of the firms' home market price volatility corroborates the results.     

Centralised order books versus hybrid order books: A paired comparison of trading costs on NSC (Euronext Paris) and SETS (London Stock Exchange)

This article compares the cost of trading large capitalisation equities on the hybrid order-driven segment of the London Stock Exchange and the centralised electronic order book of Euronext. Using samples of stocks matched according to economic sector, free float capitalisation, and trading volume, our study shows that transaction costs are lower on the centralised order book than on the hybrid order book. The presence of dealers outside the electronic order book favours the frequency of large trades, but is associated with higher execution costs for all other trades and higher adverse selection and inventory costs inside the order book.     

Is the Electronic Open Limit Order Book Inevitable?

Under fairly general conditions, the article derives the equilibrium price schedule determined by the bids and offers in an open limit order book. The analysis shows: (1) the order book has a small-trade positive bid-ask spread, and limit orders profit from small trades; (2) the electronic exchange provides as much liquidity as possible in extreme situations; (3) the limit order book does not invite competition from third market dealers, while other trading institutions do; (4) If an entering exchange earns nonnegative trading profits, the consolidated price schedule matches the limit order book price schedule.     

Execution in an aggregator

An aggregator is a technology that consolidates liquidity—in the form of bid and ask prices and amounts—from multiple sources into a single unified order book to facilitate ‘best-price’ execution. It is widely used by traders in financial markets, particularly those in the globally fragmented spot currency market. In this paper, I study the properties of execution in an aggregator where multiple liquidity providers (LPs) compete for a trader’s uninformed flow. There are two main contributions. Firstly, I formulate a model for the liquidity dynamics and contract formation process, and use this to characterize key trading metrics such as the observed inside spread in the aggregator, the reject rate due to the so-called ‘last-look’ trade acceptance process, the effective spread that the trader pays, as well as the market share and gross revenues of the LPs. An important observation here is that aggregation induces adverse selection where the LP that receives the trader’s deal request will suffer from the ‘Winner’s curse’, and this effect grows stronger when the trader increases the number of participants in the aggregator. To defend against this, the model allows LPs to adjust the nominal spread they charge or alter the trade acceptance criteria. This interplay is a key determinant of transaction costs. Secondly, I analyse the properties of different execution styles. I show that when the trader splits her order across multiple LPs, a single provider that has quick market access and for whom it is relatively expensive to internalize risk can effectively force all other providers to join her in externalizing the trader’s flow thereby maximizing the market impact and aggregate hedging costs. It is therefore not only the number, but also the type of LP and execution style adopted by the trader that determines transaction costs.     

Hybrid markets, tick size and investor trading costs

This paper shows how the tick size affects equilibrium outcomes in a hybrid stock market such as the NYSE that features both a specialist and a limit order book. Reducing the tick size facilitates the specialist's ability to step ahead of the limit order book, resulting in a reduction in the cumulative depth of the limit order book at prices above the minimum tick. If market demand is price-sensitive, and there are costs of limit order submission, the limit order book can be destroyed by tick sizes that are either too small or too large. We show that trading cost is minimized at larger tick sizes for larger market orders, creating an incentive to submit smaller orders when tick size is reduced. With a smaller tick size, specialist participation increases and specialist profit increases slightly for small market orders, and considerably for large market orders.     

Market or limit orders?

In this paper we investigate the problem of optimal order placement of an asset listed on an exchange using both market and limit orders in a simple model of market dynamics. We seek to understand under which settings it is optimal to place limit or market orders. Limit orders typically lower transaction costs but increase the risk of incomplete order execution, whereas market orders typically have higher transaction costs but are guaranteed to be executed. Rather than considering order book dynamics to determine if a limit order is executed we rely on price dynamics for this. We look at implementation shortfall in this setup with market impact of trading and propose a dynamic program to find the optimal placement of both market and limit orders for risk-neutral and risk-averse traders. With this we find a bound on the expected cost of trading and show that a trader who behaves optimally should always expect to pay less to trade less. We then solve the dynamic program numerically and examine optimal order placement strategies. We find that the decision between market and limit orders is sensitive to price volatility, risk aversion, and trading costs.     

Liquidity,information, strategic trading in an electronic order book: New insights from the European carbon markets

The electronic limit order book (LOB hereafter) has rapidly become the primary way of trading European carbon assets over the 4 years of the EU ETS programme (2008–2012). In this first attempt of examining the informational content of an electronic order book, we evidence that order flow imbalances have a moderate capacity to predict short term price changes. However, we find that both LOB slope and immediacy costs help to forecast quote improvements and volatility in the next 30 min. Further, we explain why informed trading is highly influential and show that it consists in mixing order splitting strategies and posting fleeting orders once the asymmetric information is reduced (Rosu, 2009). Overall, the consolidated status of the order book mirrors a high level of market uncertainty and a low degree of informational efficiency. In this way, strategic trading can in itself explain some of order book properties, independently of the degree of traders’ sophistication and market competition.     

The market spread,limit orders,and options

In this article the determinants of the quoted market spread of options are analyzed. The empirical model is based on an extension of the Ho and Stoll model of the market spread in a market with competing market makers and limit order traders. It is shown that the part of the liquidity that is supplied by limit orders vis-à-vis market makers is negatively related to the size of the market spread. This observation combined with regularities over the day in the thickness of the book of limit orders, allows us to offer a new explanation for the intraday pattern in the bid-ask spread. The article uses intraday data from the book of limit orders, transaction data, and quotation data.The author extends thanks to Bruno Biais, Phelim Boyle, Marius Jonkhart, Angelien Kemma, Teun Kloek, and George Sofianos for helpluf comments. This article was presented at the WFA-meetings in Jackson, the Financial Options Research Centre in Coventry, the EFA-meetings in Rotterdam, and the Conference on World Trading Markets at Vanderbilt University.     

Multi-market trading in the Eurodollar futures market

On March 18, 2004, the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange launched trading in Eurodollar futures contracts in an attempt to compete with a U.S. rival, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange responded to the challenge by introducing several policy changes that aided the transfer of its trading volume in Eurodollar futures from open outcry to the electronic trading platform, Globex, thereby retaining its market share. We compare trading volume, effective spread, and price discovery in Eurodollar futures at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange before and after the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange began trading the same contract. We find a general increase in trading volume on Globex beginning October 2003, way before the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange launched its contract. Globex provides greater price discovery than open outcry during the entire time period under study. Our research thus supports the global trend of conversion of traditional open outcry systems into electronic exchanges.     

Public information arrival: Price discovery and liquidity in electronic limit order markets

How information is translated into market prices is still an open question. This paper studies the impact of newswire messages on intraday price discovery, liquidity, and trading intensity in an electronic limit order market. We take an objective ex ante measure of the tone of a message to study the impacts of positive, negative, and neutral messages on price discovery and trading activity. As expected, we find higher adverse selection costs around the arrival of newswire messages. Negative messages are associated with higher adverse selection costs than positive or neutral messages. Liquidity increases around positive and neutral messages and decreases around negative messages. Available order book depth as well as the trading intensity increases around all news. Our results suggest that market participants possess different information gathering and processing capabilities and that negative news messages are particularly informative and induce stronger market reactions.     

Low-latency liquidity inefficiency strategies

The vast amount of high-frequency data heralds the use of new methods in financial data analysis and quantitative trading. This study delivers a proof-of-concept for a high frequency-based trading system based on an evolutionary computation method. Motivated by a theoretical liquidity asymmetry theorem from the market microstructure literature, grammatical evolution is used to exploit volume inefficiencies at the bid–ask spread. Using NASDAQ Historical TotalView-ITCH level two limit order book data, execution volumes can be tracked. This allows for testing of the strategies with minimal assumptions. The system evolves profitable and robust strategies with high returns and low risk.     

High-frequency trading and stock liquidity: An intraday analysis

This paper studies the impact of high-frequency trading (HFT) on intraday liquidity of CAC40 stocks listed on Euronext. Spreads display an intraday L-shaped pattern, while quoted depth follows an inverse pattern: low at the open and increasing towards the end of the trading day. When liquidity demand is particularly high, there is a high rate of order cancellations attributable to high-frequency traders who use frequent order cancellations to strategically manage their limit orders and close positions near the market close. Using the generalized method of moments estimator, we generate strong evidence that greater intensity of HFT is associated with lower spreads and higher depth. The positive effect of HFT on liquidity is due mainly to decreased adverse selection costs arising from asymmetric information among market participants.     

Specialists as risk managers: The competition between intermediated and non-intermediated markets

We develop a model that analyzes competition between a non-intermediated market (such as an electronic communications network) and an intermediated market (such as via the market specialist’s structure within the NYSE) when both markets are allowed to trade the same securities. Specialists are viewed as providers of a “volatility dampening” service, a mechanism for reducing round-trip trading costs, as well as an “order execution risk management” service. The economic value of these three specialist services is determined by five key factors (the difference in spreads between the two financial market types, investors’ holding periods, the specialist’s quoted spread in relation to the asset’s price, the relative probability of executing an order in the intermediated market, and the short-term risk-free rate).