At subsecond horizons bids and offers in U.S. equity markets are more volatile than what would be implied by long-term fundamentals. To assess costs and consequences, the paper suggests that traders' random delays (latencies) interact with quote volatility to generate execution price risk and...

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the flash crash, and explain why and how it happened. Design/methodology/approach - The author summarizes several studies suggesting various perspectives on the flash crash and its causes. Furthermore, the author highlights...

We examine whether speed is an important characteristic of traders who anticipate local price trends. These anticipatory participants correctly trade prior to the overall market and systematically act before other participants. They use manual and algorithmic order entry methods, but most are...

We propose a model of market making where a strategic high frequency trader exploits his speed and informational advantages to place quotes that interact with the orders of low frequency traders. We characterize the optimal market making policy of the high frequency trader analytically. Our...

Algorithmic traders acknowledge that their models are incorrectly specified, thus we allow for ambiguity in their choices to make their models robust to misspecification in: (i) the arrival rate of market orders (MOs), (ii) the fill probability of limit orders, and (iii) the dynamics of the...

We analyse all Mini Flash Crashes (or Flash Equity Failures) in the US equity markets in the four most volatile months during 2006-2011. In contrast to previous studies, we find that Mini Flash Crashes are the result of regulation framework and market fragmentation, in particular due to the...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has been revolutionized. But have financial market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from...

This paper provides evidence regarding high-frequency trader (HFT) trading performance, trading costs, and effects on market efficiency using a sample of NASDAQ trades and quotes that directly identifies HFT participation. I find that HFTs engage in successful intra-day market timing, spreads...