We study price pressures, i.e., deviations from the efficient price due to risk-averse intermediaries supplying liquidity to asynchronously arriving investors. Empirically, New York Stock Exchange intermediary data reveals economically large price pressures, 0.49% on average with a half life of...

Speeding up the exchange does not necessarily improve liquidity. On the one hand, more speed enables a high-frequency market maker (HFM) to update his quotes faster on incoming news. This reduces his payoff risk and thus lowers the competitive bid-ask spread. On the other hand, HFM price quotes...