Order Flow and Liquidity around NYSE Trading Halts

We study order flow and liquidity around NYSE trading halts. We find that market and limit order submissions and cancellations increase significantly during trading halts, that a large proportion of the limit order book at the reopen is composed of orders submitted during the halt, and that the market-clearing price at the reopen is a good predictor of future prices. Depth near the quotes is unusually low around trading halts, though specialists and/or floor traders appear to provide additional liquidity at these times. Finally, specialists appear to 'spread the quote' prior to imbalance halts to convey information to market participants.     

Order Imbalance in the FTSE Index Futures Market: Electronic versus Open Outcry Trading

Abstract:  This study examines trading activities before and after the transfer of the FTSE 100 index futures contract from open outcry to electronic trading. Daily order imbalance exhibits strong serial persistence in the electronic limit order market, but not in open-outcry trading. Both excess buying and selling reduce liquidity. In the electronic venue, prior market movements barely affect investors' buying or selling decisions. Excess buy orders do not generate any price impact, but sell orders do. Positive imbalances are more strongly autocorrelated than negative imbalances. No trading elements, such as order imbalance, volume, or open interest, are associated with volatility. Moreover, excess buying decreases volatility. Such evidence suggests that the development and growth of electronic trading has changed the dynamics of trading activities in many important ways.     

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.     

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.     

Market Quote and Spread Component Cost Behavior Around Trading Halts for Stocks Interlisted on the Montreal and Toronto Stock Exchanges

We use intraday quotes and transactions on halted securities that interlisted on the Toronto Stock Exchange and Montreal Exchange to decompose the spreads and examine quote depths. Our results show that order‐processing costs differ for trading halts at the open compared to halts during the rest of the trading day. We find that the adverse‐selection cost component of the spread is higher around trading halts and highest at the trading halt. We also find that print‐media articles that appear within the four‐day window centered on the halt have no impact on the time‐series behavior of the spread cost.     

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.     

Whose trades convey information? Evidence from a cross-section of traders

This paper contributes empirically to our understanding of informed traders. It analyzes traders’ characteristics in a foreign exchange electronic limit order market via anonymous trader identities. We use six indicators of informed trading in a cross-sectional multivariate approach to identify traders with high price impact. More information is conveyed by those traders’ trades which—simultaneously—use medium-sized orders (practice stealth trading), have large trading volume, are located in a financial center, trade early in the trading session, at times of wide spreads and when the order book is thin.     

Trading and Liquidity on the Tokyo Stock Exchange: A Bird's Eye View

The trading mechanism for equities on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) stands in sharp contrast to the primary mechanisms used to trade stocks in the United States. In the United States, exchange-designated specialists have affirmative obligations to provide continuous liquidity to the market. Specialists offer simultaneous and tight quotes to both buy and sell and supply sufficient liquidity to limit the magnitude of price changes between consecutive transactions. In contradistinction, the TSE has no exchange-designated liquidity suppliers. Instead, liquidity is provided through a public limit order book, and liquidity is organized through restrictions on maximum price changes between trades that serve to slow down trading. In this article, we examine the efficacy of the TSE's trading mechanisms at providing liquidity. Our analysis is based on a complete record of transactions and best-bid and best-offer quotes for most stocks in the First Section of the TSE over a period of 26 months. We study the size of the bid-ask spread and its cross-sectional and intertemporal stability; intertemporal patterns in returns, volatility, volume, trade size, and the frequency of trades; and market depth based on the response of quotes to trades and the frequency of trading halts and warning quotes.     

Liquidity,volume and price efficiency: The impact of order vs. quote driven trading

As equity trading becomes predominantly electronic, is there still value to a traditional, intermediated dealer system? We address this question by comparing the impact of the organization of trading on volume, liquidity, and price efficiency in a quote-driven dealer market and in an order-driven limit order book. Small order price impacts are higher and large order price impacts are lower in a dealer market. Prices are more efficient in the limit order book, except when the level of informed trading is high. Volume is higher in a limit order market, making this system most attractive for trading venues.     

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 OVER-THE-COUNTER MARKET AND NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE TRADING HALTS

This paper examines the over-the-counter (OTC) market activities for stocks temporarily suspended by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Unlike previous studies, we use transaction-to-transaction data on the NASDAQ during NYSE trading halts to investigate the price adjustment process between market equilibria. The evidence indicates that while being halted by the NYSE, the same stocks have exhibited significantly greater volatility in the OTC market. Since the volatile price movement is mainly random and provides no arbitraging opportunities for the OTC market traders, we do not find support for the proposal that trading halts should be mandatory for all trading locations.     

The information content of trading halts

We investigate the impact of trading halts of NYSE-listed stocks on informationally related securities that continue to trade during the period of the halt. Informational relationships are established for companies in the same four-digit SIC industry based on the correlation of returns, volume, volatility, and the adverse selection components of spreads. We find a significant liquidity impact on informationally related securities with spreads and price impact of trades having substantial increases. However, we also find that quoted depths, the number of trades, and trade volume significantly increase. Our results are consistent with the trading halt model of Spiegel and Subrahmanyam [2000. Asymmetric information and news disclosure rules. Journal of Financial Intermediation 9, 363–403] and with the informed trading model of Tookes [2008. Information, trading, and product market interactions: cross-sectional implications of informed trading. Journal of Finance 63, 379–413]. In addition, our results indicate that there is a common liquidity response of informationally related securities to firm-specific trading halts.     

How do individual investors trade?

This paper examines how high-frequency trading decisions of individual investors are influenced by past price changes. Specifically, we address the question as to whether decisions to open or close a position are different when investors already hold a position compared with when they do not. Based on a unique data set from an electronic foreign exchange trading platform, OANDA FXTrade, we find that investors’ future order flow is (significantly) driven by past price movements and that these predictive patterns last up to several hours. This observation clearly shows that for high-frequency trading, investors rely on previous price movements in making future investment decisions. We provide clear evidence that market and limit orders flows are much more predictable if those orders are submitted to close an existing position than if they are used to open one. We interpret this finding as evidence for the existence of a monitoring effect, which has implications for theoretical market microstructure models and behavioral finance phenomena, such as the endowment effect.     

Liquidity determination in an order-driven market

We exploit full order level information from an electronic FX broking system to provide a comprehensive account of the determination of its liquidity. We not only look at bid-ask spreads and trading volumes, but also study the determination of order entry rates and depth measures derived from the entire limit order book. We find strong predictability in the arrival of liquidity supply/demand events. Further, in times of low (high) liquidity, liquidity supply (demand) events are more common. In times of high trading activity and volatility, the ratio of limit to market order arrivals is high but order book spreads and depth deteriorate. These results are consistent with market order traders having better information than limit order traders.     

A股市场新版停牌制度实施效果的实证研究

论文使用沪深A股市场2008年10月1日-2011年11月1日的停复牌和交易数据,通过事件研究法分析了不同类型停牌的异常收益率,以信息释放和价格发现效率为标准评价新版停牌制度.研究表明：例行停牌信息含量偏少且阻碍了交易的连续性;异常波动停牌有效地降低了股票的平均异常收益率,但坏消息复牌后价格调整速度相对较慢;重大事项停牌存在严重的“消息泄露”,仅能起到事后警示的作用,同时坏消息复牌后的价格发现效率较低,重大事项停牌并不理想.     

Circuit Breakers and Market Volatility: A Theoretical Perspective

This paper examines ex ante effects of circuit breakers (mandated trading halts). We show that circuit breakers, by causing agents to suboptimally advance trades in time, may have the perverse effect of increasing price variability and exacerbating price movements. We next consider a situation in which a circuit breaker causes trading to be halted in both a dominant (more liquid) and a satellite market. As agents switch from the dominant market to the satellite market, price variability and market liquidity decline on the dominant market and increase on the satellite market.     

Intraday trading halts in the Nikkei futures market

The Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE) halts Nikkei 225 index-futures trading when the next transaction is to take place at a price more than ¥30 (prior to February 1994) or ¥60 (from February 1994) away from the previous trading price. This paper examines the efficacy of the intraday price limit rule in terms of price discovery, liquidity and volatility. We also include transaction data from the Singapore International Monetary Exchange (SIMEX) where Nikkei futures are traded simultaneously. The intraday price limit rule generally appears to be ineffective in reducing volatility and avoiding price jumps, at least partly because OSE traders have access to the alternative market at SIMEX.     

Trading Halts and Price Discovery

Trading halts have their proponents and opponents. Recent literature has examined the benefits of halts, if any, by studying the consequences of halts on order flow and price volatility. This study complements existing literature by examining the consequences of trading halts on price discovery. Our results indicate that stock price adjustments surrounding trading halts are conditioned on the underlying event that caused the halt. The weighted price contributions of all subsamples are concentrated in the halt period and some subsamples show significant price contribution in the pre-halt period as well. We find minimal evidence of price discovery continuing after the halt is removed. In addition, cross-sectional analysis shows that price discovery in the pre-halt and halt periods are more pronounced for larger firms and for firms with specific news events.      

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.     

Informed trading in hybrid bond markets

I study the impact of pretrade transparency on trading activity in an environment where dealers, informed and uninformed alike, can choose between an electronic limit order book (LOB) and an over-the-counter (OTC) market. By investigating bond dealers' choice in the hybrid Norwegian government bond market, I explore whether they base their trading strategy on the perceived informativeness of their trades. The results imply that bond dealers act strategically to preserve the value of their information by choosing the immediacy of the LOB when trades contain information. This suggests that OTC trades are exposed to a leakage of information to other dealers.