We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While multi-strategy hedge funds who were not capital constrained increased their positions, a large fraction of these funds actually acted as net sellers consistent with the view that information barriers within a firm (not just relative to outside investors) can lead to capital constraints for trading desks with mark-to-market losses. Our findings suggest that real world frictions impede arbitrage capital.
This open access book addresses four standard business school subjects: microeconomics, macroeconomics, finance and information systems as they relate to trading, liquidity, and market structure. It provides a detailed examination of the impact of trading costs and other impediments of trading that the authors call rictions It also presents an interactive simulation model of equity market trading, TraderEx, that enables students to implement trading decisions in different market scenarios and structures. Addressing these topics shines a bright light on how a real-world financial market operates, and the simulation provides students with an experiential learning opportunity that is informative and fun. Each of the chapters is designed so that it can be used as a stand-alone module in an existing economics, finance, or information science course. Instructor resources such as discussion questions, Powerpoint slides and TraderEx exercises are available online.
"The process by which securities are traded is very different from the idealized picture of a frictionless and self-equilibrating market offered by the typical finance textbook. This book offers a more accurate and authoritative take on this process. The book starts from the assumption that not everyone is present at all times simultaneously on the market, and that participants have quite diverse information about the security's fundamentals. As a result, the order flow is a complex mix of information and noise, and a consensus price only emerges gradually over time as the trading process evolves and the participants interpret the actions of other traders. Thus, a security's actual transaction price may deviate from its fundamental value, as it would be assessed by a fully informed set of investors. The book takes these deviations seriously, and explains why and how they emerge in the trading process and are eventually eliminated. The authors draw on a vast body of theoretical insights and empirical findings on security price formation that have come to form a well-defined field within financial economics known as "market microstructure." Focusing on liquidity and price discovery, the book analyzes the tension between the two, pointing out that when price-relevant information reaches the market through trading pressure rather than through a public announcement, liquidity may suffer. It also confronts many striking phenomena in securities markets and uses the analytical tools and empirical methods of market microstructure to understand them. These include issues such as why liquidity changes over time and differs across securities, why large trades move prices up or down, and why these price changes are subsequently reversed, and why we observe temporary deviations from asset fair values"--
Liquidity and Asset Prices reviews the literature that studies the relationship between liquidity and asset prices. The authors review the theoretical literature that predicts how liquidity affects a security's required return and discuss the empirical connection between the two. Liquidity and Asset Prices surveys the theory of liquidity-based asset pricing followed by the empirical evidence. The theory section proceeds from basic models with exogenous holding periods to those that incorporate additional elements of risk and endogenous holding periods. The empirical section reviews the evidence on the liquidity premium for stocks, bonds, and other financial assets.
Over the last 20 years hedge funds and derivatives have fluctuated in reputational terms; they have been blamed for the global financial crisis and been praised for the provision of liquidity in troubled times. Both topics are rather under-researched due to a combination of data and secrecy issues. This book is a collection of papers celebrating 20 years of the Journal of Derivatives and Hedge Funds (JDHF). The 18 papers included in this volume represent a small sample of influential papers included during the life of the Journal, representing industry-orientated research in these areas. With a Preface from co-editor of the journal Stephen Satchell, the first part of the collection focuses on hedge funds and the second on markets, prices and products.
The global value of trading in index futures is about $20 trillion per year and rising and for many countries the value traded is similar to that traded on their stock markets. This book describes how index futures markets work and clearly summarises the substantial body of international empirical evidence relating to these markets. Using the concepts and tools of finance, the book also provides a comprehensive description of the economic forces that underlie trading in index futures. Stock Index Futures 3/e contains many teaching and learning aids including numerous examples, a glossary, essay questions, comprehensive references, and a detailed subject index. Written primarily for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, this text will also be useful to researchers and market participants who want to gain a better understanding of these markets.
This paper provides an overview of indicators that can be used to illustrate and analyze liquidity developments in financial markets. The measures include bid-ask spreads, turnover ratios, and price impact measures. They gauge different aspects of market liquidity, namely tightness (costs), immediacy, depth, breadth, and resiliency. These measures are applied in selected foreign exchange, money, and capital markets to illustrate their operational usefulness. A number of measures must be considered because there is no single theoretically correct and universally accepted measure to determine a market's degree of liquidity and because market-specific factors and peculiarities must be considered.
