Search Results
Discussion Paper
Price Impact of Trades and Orders in the U.S. Treasury Securities Market
It’s long been known that asset prices respond not only to public information, such as macroeconomic announcements, but also to private information revealed through trading. More recently, with the growth of high-frequency trading, academics have argued that limit orders—orders to buy or sell a security at a specific price or better—also contain information. In this post, we examine the information content of trades and limit orders in the U.S. Treasury securities market, following this paper, recently published in the Journal of Financial Markets and earlier as a New York Fed staff ...
Report
Measuring treasury market liquidity
This paper examines a comprehensive set of liquidity measures for the U.S. Treasury market. The measures are analyzed relative to one another, across securities, and over time. I find highly significant price impact coefficients, such that a simple model that explains price changes with net order flow produces an R statistic above 30 percent for the two-year note. The price impact coefficients are highly correlated with bid-ask spreads and with episodes of reported poor liquidity (such as the fall 1998 financial markets turmoil). Quote and trade sizes correlate modestly with these episodes ...
Report
Price and size discovery in financial markets: evidence from the U.S. Treasury securities market
We study the workup protocol, an important size discovery mechanism in the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find that shocks in workup order flow explain 6-8 percent of the variation of returns on benchmark notes and, across maturities, contribute 10 percent to the variation of the yield curve level factor. Information related to proprietary client order flow is more likely to show up in workup trades, whereas information derived from public announcements is more likely to come through pre-workup (or “lit”) trades. Our findings highlight how the nature of information affects the ...
Discussion Paper
Assessing the Price Impact of Treasury Market Workups
The price impact of a trade derives largely from its information content. The “workup” mechanism, a trading protocol used in the U.S. Treasury securities market, is designed to mitigate the instantaneous price impact of a trade by allowing market participants to trade additional quantities of a security after a buyer and seller first agree on its price. Nevertheless, workup trades are not necessarily free of information. In this post, we assess the role of workups in price discovery, following our recent paper in the Review of Asset Pricing Studies (an earlier version of which was ...
Discussion Paper
How Liquid Has the Treasury Market Been in 2022?
Policymakers and market participants are closely watching liquidity conditions in the U.S. Treasury securities market. Such conditions matter because liquidity is crucial to the many important uses of Treasury securities in financial markets. But just how liquid has the market been and how unusual is the liquidity given the higher-than-usual volatility? In this post, we assess the recent evolution of Treasury market liquidity and its relationship with price volatility and find that while the market has been less liquid in 2022, it has not been unusually illiquid after accounting for the high ...
Discussion Paper
U.S. Treasury Market Action on Election Night 2016
As the midterm elections approach, it’s worth revisiting the striking financial market response to the last federal elections in 2016. U.S. equity market futures and Treasury yields first plunged on election night 2016, as the presidential election results turned out closer than expected, but quickly rebounded after President Trump’s victory became clear, ultimately ending the day higher. In this post, I take a close look at the unusual U.S. Treasury market behavior that night, focusing on the market conditions and trading flows amid which the sharp yield changes took place.
Report
The microstructure of a U.S. Treasury ECN: the BrokerTec platform
We assess the microstructure of the U.S. Treasury securities market following its migration to electronic trading. We model price discovery using a vector autoregression model of price and order flow. We show that both trades and limit orders affect price dynamics, suggesting that traders also choose limit orders to exploit their information. Moreover, while limit orders have smaller price impact, their greater variation contributes more to the variance of price updates. Lastly, we find increased price impact of trades and especially limit orders following major announcements (such as FOMC ...
Working Paper
Price Discovery in the U.S. Treasury Cash Market: On Principal Trading Firms and Dealers
We explore the following question: does the trading activity of registered dealers on Treasury interdealer broker (IDB) platforms differ from that of principal trading firms (PTFs), and if so, how and to what effect on market liquidity? To do so, we use a novel dataset that combines Treasury cash transaction reports from FINRA’s Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE) and publicly available limit order book data from BrokerTec. We find that trades conducted in a limit order book setting have high permanent price impact when a PTF is the passive party, playing the role of ...
Working Paper
Trader Positions and Marketwide Liquidity Demand
In electronic, liquid markets, traders frequently change their positions. The distribution of these trader position changes carries important information about liquidity demand in the market. From this distribution of trader position-changes, we construct a marketwide measure for intraday liquidity demand that does not necessarily depend on aggressive trading. Using a rich regulatory dataset on S&P 500 E-mini futures and 10-year Treasury futures markets, we show that this liquidity demand measure has a positive impact on prices. We then decompose our measure of liquidity demand into three ...