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Peter HoffmannEuropean Central Bank; e-mail: peter.hoffmann@ecb.europa.eu
AbstractWe study the role of high-frequency trading in a dynamic limit order market. Being fast is valuable because it enables traders to revise outstanding limit orders upon news arrivals when interacting with slow market participants. On the one hand, the existence of fast traders can help to reduce the ine¢ ciency that is rooted in the risk of being "picked o¤" after unfavourable price movements and therefore allows more gains from trade to be realized. On the other hand, slow traders face a relative loss in bargaining power which leads them to strategically submit limit orders with a lower execution probability, thereby reducing trade. Due to this negative externality, the equilibrium level of investment is always welfare-reducing. The model generates additional testable implications regarding the e¤ects of high-frequency trading on order ‡ow statistics.Keywords: High-frequency trading, Limit Order Market JEL Classi…cation: G19, C72, D621
Non-Technical SummaryDuring the past decade or so, trading in financial markets has become increasingly automated, with recent estimates suggesting that high-frequency trading (HFT) is now accounting for more than half of all transactions in U.S. equity markets. While the use of information technology for trading purposes is not a recent phenomenon per se, it has become the decisive factor in an industry where the proverb "time is money" is being taken literally and market participants are engaged in an arms race at the millisecond level.This strong growth has ignited a heated debate among academics, practitioners, and regulators about the benefits and concerns associated with an increasing automation of the trading process. While proponents argue that HFT increases market efficiency via improved liquidity and price discovery, critiques claim that at least some of the associated trading strategies are making profits at the expense of other market participants and have the potential to destabilize markets.This paper contributes to the on-going debate by presenting a stylized model of trading in a limit order market where agents differ in their trading speed, which is thought to capture the difference between (fast) HFTs and (slow) human market participants. Following Foucault (1999), we assume that agents' limit orders are subject to the risk of being "picked off" by other traders upon the arrival of new ...