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Latency delays intentionally slow order execution at an exchange, often to protect market makers against latency arbitrage. We study informed trading in a fragmented market in which one exchange introduces a latency delay on market orders. Liquidity improves at the delayed exchange as informed investors emigrate to the conventional exchange, where liquidity worsens. In aggregate, implementing a latency delay worsens total expected welfare. We find that the impact on price discovery depends on the relative abundance of speculators. If the exchange with delay technology competes against a conventional exchange, it implements a delay only if it has sufficiently low market share.

Each extractor has a distinct quadratic extraction cost and faces a linear industry demand schedule. We observe that the open loop and closed loop solutions are the same if initial stocks are such that each competitor is extracting in every period in which her competitors are extracting. (oligop_july06.tex

Dark pools offer price improvement over displayed quotes, but nondisplayed liquidity implies execution uncertainty. Because investor limit orders also provide price improvement with execution risk, dark pools offer a natural substitute. In a model of informed trading in a market with a displayed limit order book and a dark pool that offers price improvement, higher valuation investors sort into order types with lower execution risk, generating an “immediacy hierarchy.” Dark pool price improvement predicts the order in the hierarchy: a price improvement closer to (farther from) the midquote positions dark orders below (above) limit orders, which improves (worsens) market quality and welfare. A dark pool that is operated by the limit order book is welfare improving, and welfare reduces with an independently operated pool. Because active and passive order flow migrate to the dark pool where price impact occurs only post-trade, price efficiency worsens with any positive level of dark trading. This paper was accepted by Gustavo Manso, finance.

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