Market Frictions - High frequency trading

8 important questions on Market Frictions - High frequency trading

What are high frequency traders?

Firms using investor capital to trade for their own account using algorithms/high-frequency strategies

How did the flash crash of may 6 happen?

  • One big fundamental sale of e-mini (SP500 futures)
  • Strong reaction by algo's
  • Due to fragmented liquidity, cross-market arbitrage broke down
  • Relation between maximum price change and fragmentation? --> Madhavan

Relationship between fragmentation and tha flash crash

More fragmentation means that the response to the falsh crash is stronger (HF -0.182) (the higher the herfindahl index, the lower the fragmentation)

-> the higher the herfindahl index --> the less fragmentation --> the lower the maximum drawdown ; more fragmentation --> bigger response to flashcrash
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What are the  sources of illiquidity (e.g., why are markets not working perfectly?)

  1. Exogeneous trading costs
  2. Private information
  3. Search costs
  4. Inventory risk for the market maker

Sources of illiquidity; what are is private information?

The probability of trading against an informed trader requires compensation (adverse selection) -> increase bid-ask spread -> increases illiquidity

Sources of illiquidity; what are search costs?

Finding a counterparty may require some time, which is costly because of the uncertainty on the price at which the trade is executed

Sources of illiquidity; inventory risk for the market maker

Market maket needs to carry inventory. He bears a risk that fundamentals change in the meantime (if you want to quote an ask; you need to own the asset)

Measuring liquidity; how do the measures three interact

1 and 2 are interacting with each other. When you are a big investor and want to buy a stock. The trade will be big. I could do 1 order but then there is a high probability that I will run deeply into the order book. I could also divide this into multiple orders, now I won’t affect the price but it will take much longer.

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