The effect of liquidity and arbitrage on the price efficiency of Chinese ETFs

We study the potential factors that determine the large and persistent price deviations in Chinese equity exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Our results suggest that ETF liquidity and arbitrage activity are positively correlated with ETF price efficiency, and the relation is more pronounced with higher institutional ownership. We also evaluate the effect of two exogenous shocks in the Chinese market. Using a policy change that added market makers to ETFs on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) and Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), we find that market makers improve price efficiency and that the impact is stronger for ETFs with lower liquidity. We also exploit a change in trading rules on the SZSE and show that the relaxation of arbitrage restrictions improves price efficiency. Altogether, these findings provide evidence that lack of liquidity, due to the unique market structure and regulations of the Chinese market, contributes to price inefficiency of Chinese ETFs.     

Unskilled fund managers: Replicating active fund performance with few ETFs

This paper uses Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) instead of risk factors as benchmarks to examine active mutual fund performance distribution. While transaction costs are included in the ETF returns, that is not true regarding risk factors, making it more challenging to characterize extraordinary performances via alphas. Assessments are based on the estimation of the skilled funds proportion defined by Barras et al. (2010). After evaluating several ETF combinations, we conclude that sets of 3 to 5 ETFs replicate most levels of active fund performance. Finally, we propose specific ETF selection algorithms, whereby we estimate that 95% of active management funds fail to generate value for their investors. Alphas calculated with ETFs are higher than those using risk factors, and the difference is similar to the transaction costs required for investing in risk factor portfolios (Frazzini et al. (2012)).     

ETFs的组织结构

虽然有人认为ETFs和一些创新产品构成了对共同基金业的威胁，但也有一些专家认为ETFs不过是主流产品(如共同基金)之外的创新产品，短期内难以撼动基金业的根基。它们在快速繁殖与发展，但那属于演进而不属于革命。最重要的是这些产品对投资者究竟有什么好处，如何更好地保护公共投资者的利益。……     

积极做市,树立银行间市场做市商品牌

中国农业银行资金交易中心作为银行间市场第一个资金交易中心,多年来始终是银行间市场上交易最活跃、最有实力、最具影响力的机构之一,2002年至2006年连续五年实现银行间市场交易量排名第一。作为银行间市场的首批双边报价商,农行已经连续6年多坚持每个交易日多券种、小价差报价,在发现市场价格和活跃市场交易方面发挥了积极作用,     

海外ETFs交易模型

ETFs是一种在交易所交易的开放式指数基金，1993年产生于美国，在1998年后得到迅速发展，到2000年已成为美国基金市场的新宠，并在全球得到迅速发展。ETFs独特的交易方式，是其取得成功的重要原因。本文……     

The new-Keynesian liquidity trap

Many new-Keynesian models produce a deep recession with deflation at the zero bound. These models also make unusual policy predictions: Useless government spending, technical regress, capital destruction, and forward guidance can raise output. Moreover, these predictions are larger as prices become less sticky and as changes are expected further in the future. I show that these predictions are strongly affected by equilibrium selection. For the same interest-rate path, equilibria that bound initial jumps predict mild inflation, small output variation, negative multipliers, small effects of far-off expectations and a smooth frictionless limit. Fiscal policy considerations suggest the latter equilibria.     

The dynamics of leveraged ETFs returns: a panel data study

Leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs) are limited liability securities that allow investors to take daily constant leverage bets on a reference index. This work proposes a new empirical design to investigate the dynamics of quarterly LETFs returns. Rather than relying on fund-by-fund overlapping regressions, as in existing literature, the paper exploits a large panel of non-overlapping data covering the whole universe of Proshares, the US primary LETFs provider. Overall, it is found that the variables prescribed by theory broadly explain cross-sectional variability. It is also found that inverse LETFs and more generally, leveraged funds operating in asset classes like international equity, bonds and commodities underperform theoretical predictions. This underperformance is mainly attributed to frictions in the process of implementing the required daily leverage.     

ETFs的运作模式及借鉴

ETFs有既开放又封闭的特点，具有独到优势。对投资而言，其管理成本低，交易便利；对基金管理公司而言，采用股票赎回的方式能在一定程度上避免对基金管理的冲击；对监管当局而言，比一般封闭式基金在避免基金道德风险上有了进步。     

ETFs能做什么?

随着近年来ETFs在全球的迅猛发展,ETFs产品已经越来越工具化了.这是因为ETFs的优势越来越体现在:富有弹性的产品设计与灵活便利的交易机制或交易方式结合在一起,使ETFs成为多角度的、多层面的各种动态的投资组合或资产配置的一个不可或缺的组成部分.因此,ETFs不再仅仅是一个投资产品,可以被投资者用来做很多事情.     

The dark side of liquidity regulation: Bank opacity and funding liquidity risk

We evaluate how the liquidity coverage rule affects US banks’ opacity and funding liquidity risk. Banks subject to the rule become significantly more opaque and funding liquidity risk increases by $245 million per quarter. Higher funding liquidity risk is more pronounced among banks that are subject to the rule’s more stringent liquidity buffers, and systemically riskier banks. Rising opacity reflects an increase in banks’ holdings of complex assets whose value is difficult to communicate to investors. The evidence highlights the unintended consequences of liquidity regulation and is consistent with theoretical models’ predictions of a trade-off between liquidity buffers and bank opacity that exacerbates funding liquidity risk.     

国内推出ETFS的若干问题探讨

作为近年来国际上增长最快的金融创新产品，ETFs的成功与其自身的特点和优势以及所在证券市场的法律、监管、税收、市场环境均有着密切的联系；另一方面，ETFs也存在自身固有的一些缺点和局限，与传统的开放式基金相比各有利弊，而并非绝对地优于后者。 本文对ETFs这一近期在国内备受关注的新型基金产品做一客观的较为全面的分析，并在此基础上就现阶段在国内推出ETFs的可行性进行探讨。……     

The world price of liquidity risk

This paper empirically tests the liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model of Acharya and Pedersen (2005) on a global level. Consistent with the model, I find evidence that liquidity risks are priced independently of market risk in international financial markets. That is, a security’s required rate of return depends on the covariance of its own liquidity with aggregate local market liquidity, as well as the covariance of its own liquidity with local and global market returns. I also show that the US market is an important driving force of global liquidity risk. Furthermore, I find that the pricing of liquidity risk varies across countries according to geographic, economic, and political environments. The findings show that the systematic dimension of liquidity provides implications for international portfolio diversification.     

流动性过剩与农信社流动性不足

2007年以来,为缓解流动性过剩,控制货币信贷过快增长,央行频繁运用公开市场操作和上调存款准备金率等手段,加大货币回收力度.这虽然抑制了银行体系的流动性过剩,但对于作为弱势金融群体的农村信用社来说,紧缩货币政策实施所产生的累积效应对一些经济欠发达山区农信社的流动性管理带来了不利的影响,隐含的支付性风险不容忽视.     

Understanding the risk of leveraged ETFs

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the risks of leveraged ETFs. We do this by showing how to construct a k-times leveraged ETF as a dynamic portfolio in the ETF and a money market account. This construction characterizes the return distribution of the leveraged ETF over any investment horizon. As a corollary, we show that a k-times leveraged ETF will not earn k times the return of the ETF. It differs due to a term involving the ETF’s volatility and the interest paid on the borrowing over the investment horizon.     

Market liquidity in the financial crisis: The role of liquidity commonality and flight-to-quality

We examine the dynamics and the drivers of market liquidity during the financial crisis, using a unique volume-weighted spread measure. According to the literature we find that market liquidity is impaired when stock markets decline, implying a positive relation between market and liquidity risk. Moreover, this relationship is the stronger the deeper one digs into the order book. Even more interestingly, this paper sheds further light on so far puzzling features of market liquidity: liquidity commonality and flight-to-quality. We show that liquidity commonality varies over time, increases during market downturns, peaks at major crisis events and becomes weaker the deeper we look into the limit order book. Consistent with recent theoretical models that argue for a spiral effect between the financial sector’s funding liquidity and an asset’s market liquidity, we find that funding liquidity tightness induces an increase in liquidity commonality which then leads to market-wide liquidity dry-ups. Therefore our findings corroborate the view that market liquidity can be a driving force for financial contagion. Finally, we show that there is a positive relationship between credit risk and liquidity risk, i.e., there is a spread between liquidity costs of high and low credit quality stocks, and that in times of increased market uncertainty the impact of credit risk on liquidity risk intensifies. This corroborates the existence of a flight-to-quality or flight-to-liquidity phenomenon also on the stock markets.     

Intraday indirect arbitrage between European index ETFs

We investigate intraday arbitrage between close substitute Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) on two major European indices: FTSE100 and DAX30. Using intraday data, we establish arbitrage links between our ETFs through cointegration and error correction models. We then apply an arbitrage identification procedure on approximately 18 million intraday matched quotes, resulting in 1.95% and 0.2% of observations on the ETF pairs for FTSE100 and DAX30 as arbitrage opportunities. They occur on specific days in our sample, disappear relatively quickly, and result in economically insignificant profits from arbitrage trades within the mispricing window, indicating overall price efficiency.     

The effects of insider trading on liquidity

This study examines the impacts of directors' dealings on firm liquidity. Consistent with the information asymmetry hypothesis, spread widens and depth falls on insider trading days as compared to non-insider trading days. This result suggests that increased share trading by insiders impairs liquidity. In addition, the spread (depth) measures are positively (negatively) related to how heavily the shares are transacted by informed traders; that is, the greater the number of shares traded by the directors, the wider (narrower) the spread (depth).     

The effect of ETFs on financial markets: a literature review

Exchange-traded funds (ETFs) belong to the fastest growing investment products worldwide. Within 15 years, total assets invested in ETFs have twenty-folded, reaching over $3.7 trillion at the end of 2018. Increasing demand for passive investments, coupled with high liquidity and low transaction costs, are key advantages of ETFs compared to their closest substitutes such as traditional index funds. Besides the continuous growth of ETFs, the Flash Crash in 2010 triggered detailed investigations by regulators on how ETFs affect the financial market. This literature review provides a broad overview of recent academic studies analyzing the effect of ETFs on liquidity, price discovery, volatility, and comovement of the underlying securities.

     

Volume,liquidity, and liquidity risk

Many classes of microstructure models, as well as intuition, suggest that it should be easier to trade when markets are more active. In the data, however, volume and liquidity seem unrelated over time. This paper offers an explanation for this fact based on a simple frictionless model in which liquidity reflects the average risk-bearing capacity of the economy and volume reflects the changing contribution of individuals to that average. Volume and liquidity are unrelated in the model, but volume is positively related to the variance of liquidity, or liquidity risk. Empirical evidence from the U.S. government bond and stock markets supports this new prediction.