The May 2010 Flash Crash and August 2007 Quant Meltdown raised concerns about the impact of quantitative investment strategies on market stability. Theory is split on whether quantitative investing dampens or exacerbates market instability. To test the theory we focus on mutual fund fire sales....

We study performance and competition among high-frequency traders (HFTs). We construct measures of latency and find that differences in relative latency account for large differences in HFTs' trading performance. HFTs that improve their latency rank due to colocation upgrades see improved...