In this paper, a shorter and more publication focused version of our recent article “A Bottom-Up Approach to the financial Markets” is presented. More specifically we propose a new approach to studying the financial markets using the Bottom-Up approach instead of the traditional Top-Down. We...

We show that it is virtually impossible for individuals to day trade for a living, contrary to what course providers claim. We observe all individuals who began to day trade between 2013 and 2015 in the Brazilian equity futures market, the third in terms of volume in the world. We find that 97%...

This paper builds a new model of financial exchange competition, tailored to the institutional details of the modern US stock market. In equilibrium, exchange trading fees are competitive but exchanges are able to earn economic profits from the sale of speed technology. We document stylized...

A later version of this paper has been published in the Journal of Financial Stability (Volume 50, October 2020, Article Number 100776).When trading volumes are high, bitcoin futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) and -- until recently -- the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) lead...

We measure the extent to which consolidated liquidity in modern fragmented equity markets overstates true liquidity due to a phenomenon that we call Ghost Liquidity (GL). GL exists when traders place duplicate limit orders on competing venues, intending for only one of the orders to execute, and...

We assess the consequences for market quality and welfare of different entry regimes and exchange pricing policies, integrating a microstructure model with a free-entry, exchange competition model where exchanges have market power in technological services. We find that services can be strategic...

This paper studies the behaviour of Bitcoin returns at different sample frequencies. We consider high frequency returns starting from tick-by-tick price changes traded at the Bitstamp and Coinbase exchanges. We find evidence of a smooth intra-daily seasonality pattern, and an abnormal trade- and...

We show that economically insignificant tick sizes encourage undercutting behavior, harming market quality. While theory shows increasing tick sizes in unconstrained markets reduces undercutting, improving market quality, pricing grids of most markets are too coarse to test this. We examine a...

We examine the role of algorithmic traders as arbitrageurs and their impact on price efficiency in the interdealer foreign exchange market. Algorithmic traders do not improve price efficiency by detecting and exploiting mis-priced currency pairs. To the contrary, algorithmic traders contribute...

Latency delays — known as “speed bumps” — slow the execution of orders at an exchange, often to protect market makers against latency arbitrage. We study informed trading in a fragmented market, where one exchange introduces a latency delay on market orders. While liquidity improves at...