Trading activity surges associated with latency arbitrage are costly, as they lead to both lower liquidity and inefficient investments in order processing capacity that remains idle 90% of the time. A congestion message fee on liquidity-taking orders alleviates both concerns. The fee surges...

We study a unique data set of all client trades that the six largest Canadian dealers sent to U.S. equity markets in 2014-2015. Contrary to the public perception, Canadian dealers use U.S. markets only lightly and send less than 5% of their $-volume to the U.S.; on 60% of security-day...