Cross-Sectional Variation of Intraday Liquidity, Cross-Impact, and Their Effect on Portfolio Execution

Over the past decade, there has been a significant rise in assets managed under passive and systematic strategies. Such strategies hold and trade portfolios in a coordinated manner, often concentrating trading around the end of the trading session. Simultaneously, there has been a rise in activity from market participants that act as liquidity providers, themselves trading along portfolio directions. In “Cross-Sectional Variation of Intraday Liquidity, cross-impact, and Their Effect on Portfolio Execution,” Min, Maglaras, and Moallemi investigate the implications of these two observations, specifically exploring how the phenomenon of portfolio liquidity provision leads to cross-security impact and influences the optimal execution schedules of risk-neutral traders that seek to minimize their expected execution costs. They show that the optimized schedules deviate from the naïve approach that trades each security separately and instead, couple the trading intensity across stocks so as to benefit from the liquidity provided along attractive portfolio trading directions. Empirical analysis demonstrates that coupled optimized schedules could lower costs by as much as 15% relative to the naïve approach.

Who Pays Attention to SEC Form 8-K?

The SEC requires public companies to disclose material information on Form 8-K within four days of a triggering event. We show that, on 8-K event and filing dates, there is significant abnormal attention on Bloomberg terminals, which are a source of information for institutional investors, while traditional media attention tends to be higher on filing days. Significant price discovery occurs on the event date and on the days between that day and the filing date. The traditional media coverage on the filing day appears to attract the attention of retail investors and leads to further price changes in the direction of the pre-filing day price change. Institutional investors exploit this price pressure via opportunistic liquidity provision. Overall, our evidence suggests that the Form 8-K filing may have little direct informational benefit, particularly to retail investors.

Central Counterparties and Liquidity Provision in Cash Markets

This paper investigates increased liquidity provision by market makers resulting from their ability to reduce balance sheet encumbrance through the use of central counterparties (CCPs). The introduction of the Basel III leverage rule constitutes a shock to market makers’ balance sheets and thus affects their capacity to intermediate trades. Using trade-by-trade data from sovereign bond markets, we show that liquidity provision by CCP members decreased to a lesser extent following the rule change. We attribute these findings to balance sheet reductions due to the netting enabled by CCPs, thereby highlighting their importance in cash markets.

Liquidity Provision and Co-insurance in Bank Syndicates

We study the capacity of the banking system to provide liquidity to the corporate sector in times of stress and how changes in this capacity affect corporate liquidity management. We show that the contractual arrangements among banks in loan syndicates co-insure liquidity risks of credit line drawdowns and generate a network of interbank exposures. We develop a simple model and simulate the liquidity and insurance capacity of the banking network. We find that the liquidity capacity of large banks has significantly increased following the introduction of liquidity regulation, and that the liquidity co-insurance function in loan syndicates is economically important. We also find that borrowers with higher reliance on credit lines in their liquidity management have become more likely to obtain credit lines from syndicates with higher liquidity. The assortative matching on liquidity characteristics has strengthened the role of banks as liquidity providers to the corporate sector.

High-frequency trading and networked markets

Financial markets have undergone a deep reorganization during the last 20 y. A mixture of technological innovation and regulatory constraints has promoted the diffusion of market fragmentation and high-frequency trading. The new stock market has changed the traditional ecology of market participants and market professionals, and financial markets have evolved into complex sociotechnical institutions characterized by a great heterogeneity in the time scales of market members’ interactions that cover more than eight orders of magnitude. We analyze three different datasets for two highly studied market venues recorded in 2004 to 2006, 2010 to 2011, and 2018. Using methods of complex network theory, we show that transactions between specific couples of market members are systematically and persistently overexpressed or underexpressed. Contemporary stock markets are therefore networked markets where liquidity provision of market members has statistically detectable preferences or avoidances with respect to some market members over time with a degree of persistence that can cover several months. We show a sizable increase in both the number and persistence of networked relationships between market members in most recent years and how technological and regulatory innovations affect the networked nature of the markets. Our study also shows that the portfolio of strategic trading decisions of high-frequency traders has evolved over the years, adding to the liquidity provision other market activities that consume market liquidity.