We examine the role of high-frequency traders (HFTs) in price discovery and price efficiency. Overall HFTs facilitate price efficiency by trading in the direction of permanent price changes and in the opposite direction of transitory pricing errors, both on average and on the highest volatility days. This is done through their liquidity demanding orders. In contrast, HFTs' liquidity supplying orders are adversely selected. The direction of HFTs' trading predicts price changes over short horizons measured in seconds. The direction of HFTs' trading is correlated with public information, such as macro news announcements, market-wide price movements, and limit order book imbalances.

/pdf/high-frequency-trading-and-price-discovery-x4qkdaexz6.pdf

High-Frequency Trading and Price Discovery

We study intraday market intermediation in an electronic market before and during a period of large and temporary selling pressure. On May 6, 2010, U.S. financial markets experienced a systemic intraday event—the Flash Crash—where a large automated selling program was rapidly executed in the E-mini S&P 500 stock index futures market. Using audit trail transaction-level data for the E-mini on May 6 and the previous three days, we find that the trading pattern of the most active nondesignated intraday intermediaries (classified as High-Frequency Traders) did not change when prices fell during the Flash Crash.

/pdf/the-flash-crash-high-frequency-trading-in-an-electronic-3v403zh9bd.pdf

The Flash Crash: High‐Frequency Trading in an Electronic Market

The regulatory debate concerning high-frequency trading (HFT) emphasizes the importance of distinguishing different HFT strategies and their influence on market quality. Using data from NASDAQ-OMX Stockholm, we compare market-making HFTs to opportunistic HFTs. We find that market makers constitute the lion’s share of HFT trading volume (65-71%) and limit order traffic (81-86%). Furthermore, market makers have higher order-to-trade ratios and lower latency than opportunistic HFTs. In a natural experiment based on tick size changes, we find that the activity of market-making HFTs mitigates intraday price volatility.

The Diversity of High-Frequency Traders

We compare the optimal trading strategy of an informed speculator when he can trade ahead of incoming news (is “fast”), versus when he cannot (is “slow”). We find that speed matters: the fast speculator's trades account for a larger fraction of trading volume, and are more correlated with short-run price changes. Nevertheless, he realizes a large fraction of his profits from trading on long-term price changes. The fast speculator's behavior matches evidence about high-frequency traders. We predict that stocks with more informative news are more liquid even though they attract more activity from informed high-frequency traders.

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Ioanid_Rosu.pdf

News Trading and Speed

We show that two exogenous technology shocks that increase the speed of trading from microseconds to nanoseconds do not lead to improvements on quoted spread, effective spread, trading volume or variance ratio. However, cancellation/execution ratio increases dramatically from 26:1 to 32:1, short term volatility increases and market depth decreases. We find evidence consistent with “quote stuffing,” which involves submitting an extraordinarily large number of orders followed by immediate cancellation in order to generate order congestion. The stock data are handled by six independent channels in the NASDAQ based on alphabetic order of ticker symbols. We detect abnormally high levels of co-movement of message flows for stocks in the same channel using factor regression, a discontinuity test and diff-in-diff test. Our results suggest that an arms race in speed at the sub-millisecond level is a positional game in which a trader’s pay-off depends on her speed relative to other traders. This game leads to positional externality (Frank and Bernanke, 2012), in which private benefit leads to offsetting investments on speed, or effort to slow down other traders or the exchange, with no observed social benefit.

/pdf/the-externalities-of-high-frequency-trading-1-wuhsporslx.pdf

The Externalities of High-Frequency Trading 1

This study tests the hypothesis that high-frequency traders (HFTs) identify patterns that allow them to anticipate and trade ahead of other investors’ order flow. HFTs’ aggressive purchases and sales lead those of other investors. The effect is consistently stronger for a subset of HFTs and at times when non-HFTs are hypothesized to be less focused on disguising order flow. These results are not fully explained by HFTs reacting faster to signals that non-HFTs also observe such as news, contrarian or trend-chasing behavior by non-HFTs, and trader misclassification. These findings support the existence of an anticipatory trading channel through which HFTs may increase non-HFT trading costs.

/pdf/do-high-frequency-traders-anticipate-buying-and-selling-2me57dr0yl.pdf

Do High-Frequency Traders Anticipate Buying and Selling Pressure?

This study provides evidence that high-frequency traders (HFTs) identify patterns in past trades and orders that allow them to anticipate and trade ahead of other investors’ order flow. Specificall...

/pdf/do-high-frequency-traders-anticipate-buying-and-selling-2dffu0e3tr.pdf

Nicholas H. Hirschey

Papers

Do High-Frequency Traders Anticipate Buying and Selling Pressure?

Do High-Frequency Traders Anticipate Buying and Selling Pressure?