Search Results
Report
Volatility and liquidity in futures markets
We study the provision of liquidity in futures markets as price volatility changes. For both active and inactive contracts, customer trading costs do not increase with volatility. However, for three of the four contracts studied, the nature of liquidity supply changes with volatility. Specifically, for relatively inactive contracts, customers as a group trade more with each other (and less with market makers) on higher volatility days. By contrast, for the most active contract, trading between customers and market makers increases with volatility. We also find that market makers' income per ...
Report
Did the good guys lose?: heterogeneous traders and regulatory restrictions on dual trading
We study the effect of restrictions on dual trading in futures contracts. Previous studies have found that dual trading restrictions can have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on market liquidity. In this paper, we propose that trader heterogeneity may explain these conflicting results. We find that, for contracts affected by restrictions, the change in market activity following restrictions differs between contracts. More important, the effect of a restriction varies among dual traders in the same market. For example, dual traders who ceased trading the S&P 500 index futures ...
Report
Market liquidity and trader welfare in multiple dealer markets: evidence from dual trading restrictions
Dual trading is the practice whereby futures floor traders execute trades both for their own and customers' accounts on the same day. We provide evidence, in the context of restrictions on dual trading, that aggregate liquidity measures, such as the average bid-ask spread, may be misleading indicators of traders' welfare in markets with multiple, heterogeneously skilled dealers. In our theoretical model, hedgers and informed customers trade through futures floor traders of different skill levels: more skilled floor traders attract more hedgers to trade. We show that customers' welfare and ...
Conference Paper
Liquidity and price shocks in futures markets
Working Paper
Index arbitrage and nonlinear dynamics between the S&P 500 futures and cash
We use a cost of carry model with nonzero transactions costs to motivate estimation of a nonlinear dynamic relationship between the S&P 500 futures and cash indexes. Discontinuous arbitrage suggests that a threshold error correction mechanism may characterize many aspects of the relationship between the futures and cash indexes. We use minute-by-minute data on the S&P 500 futures and cash indexes. The results indicate that nonlinear dynamics are important and related to arbitrage and suggest that arbitrage is associated with more rapid convergence of the basis to the cost of carry than would ...