IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/22551.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

How Rigged Are Stock Markets?: Evidence From Microsecond Timestamps

Author

Listed:
  • Robert P. Bartlett, III
  • Justin McCrary

Abstract

We use new timestamp data from the two Securities Information Processors (SIPs) to examine SIP reporting latencies for quote and trade reports. Reporting latencies average 1.13 milliseconds for quotes and 22.84 milliseconds for trades. Despite these latencies, liquidity-taking orders gain on average $0.0002 per share when priced at the SIP-reported national best bid or offer (NBBO) rather than the NBBO calculated using exchanges’ direct data feeds. Trading surrounding SIP-priced trades shows little evidence that fast traders initiate these liquidity-taking orders to pick-off stale quotes. These findings contradict claims that fast traders systematically exploit traders who transact at the SIP NBBO.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert P. Bartlett, III & Justin McCrary, 2016. "How Rigged Are Stock Markets?: Evidence From Microsecond Timestamps," NBER Working Papers 22551, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22551
    Note: AP CF LE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22551.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Alan I. Barreca & Jason M. Lindo & Glen R. Waddell, 2016. "Heaping-Induced Bias In Regression-Discontinuity Designs," Economic Inquiry, Western Economic Association International, vol. 54(1), pages 268-293, January.
    2. Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke, 2009. "Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 8769.
    3. Lee, Charles M C & Ready, Mark J, 1991. "Inferring Trade Direction from Intraday Data," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(2), pages 733-746, June.
    4. Michael Goldstein & James J. Angel, 2014. "When Finance Meets Physics: The Impact of the Speed of Light on Financial Markets and Their Regulation," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 49(2), pages 271-281, May.
    5. Michael Goldstein & Shengwei Ding & John Hanna & Terrence Hendershott, 2014. "How Slow Is the NBBO? A Comparison with Direct Exchange Feeds," The Financial Review, Eastern Finance Association, vol. 49(2), pages 313-332, May.
    6. Eric Budish & Peter Cramton & John Shim, 2015. "Editor's Choice The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 130(4), pages 1547-1621.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bartlett, Robert P. & McCrary, Justin, 2019. "How rigged are stock markets? Evidence from microsecond timestamps," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 37-60.
    2. Craig W. Holden & Stacey Jacobsen & Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, 2014. "The Empirical Analysis of Liquidity," Foundations and Trends(R) in Finance, now publishers, vol. 8(4), pages 263-365, December.
    3. Aepli, Manuel & Kuhn, Andreas & Schweri, Jürg, 2021. "Culture, norms, and the provision of training by employers: Evidence from the Swiss language border," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(C).
    4. Hagströmer, Björn, 2021. "Bias in the effective bid-ask spread," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 142(1), pages 314-337.
    5. Chin‐Ho Chen & Junmao Chiu & Huimin Chung, 2020. "Arbitrage opportunities, liquidity provision, and trader types in an index option market," Journal of Futures Markets, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(3), pages 279-307, March.
    6. James J. Angel & Douglas M. McCabe, 2018. "Insider Trading 2.0? The Ethics of Information Sales," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 147(4), pages 747-760, February.
    7. Lee, Ajin, 2020. "How do hospitals respond to managed care? Evidence from at-risk newborns," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 184(C).
    8. Egger, Peter H. & Wamser, Georg, 2015. "The impact of controlled foreign company legislation on real investments abroad. A multi-dimensional regression discontinuity design," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 77-91.
    9. Emile Cammeraat & Egbert Jongen & Pierre Koning, 2022. "Preventing NEETs during the Great Recession: the effects of mandatory activation programs for young welfare recipients," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 62(2), pages 749-777, February.
    10. Mauricio Villamizar‐Villegas & Freddy A. Pinzon‐Puerto & Maria Alejandra Ruiz‐Sanchez, 2022. "A comprehensive history of regression discontinuity designs: An empirical survey of the last 60 years," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(4), pages 1130-1178, September.
    11. Andersson, Josefine, 2018. "Financial incentives to work for disability insurance recipients - Sweden’s special rules for continuous deduction," Working Paper Series 2018:7, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    12. Dutordoir, Marie & Strong, Norman C. & Sun, Ping, 2022. "Does short-selling potential influence merger and acquisition payment choice?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 761-779.
    13. Vives, Xavier & Cespa, Giovanni, 2016. "Market Transparency and Fragility," CEPR Discussion Papers 11732, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. Robert P. Bartlett, III & Justin McCrary, 2015. "Dark Trading at the Midpoint: Pricing Rules, Order Flow, and High Frequency Liquidity Provision," NBER Working Papers 21286, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    15. Bartalotti Otávio, 2019. "Regression Discontinuity and Heteroskedasticity Robust Standard Errors: Evidence from a Fixed-Bandwidth Approximation," Journal of Econometric Methods, De Gruyter, vol. 8(1), pages 1-26, January.
    16. Bidisha Chakrabarty & Pankaj K. Jain & Andriy Shkilko & Konstantin Sokolov, 2021. "Unfiltered Market Access and Liquidity: Evidence from the SEC Rule 15c3-5," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(2), pages 1183-1198, February.
    17. Chordia, Tarun & Miao, Bin, 2020. "Market efficiency in real time: Evidence from low latency activity around earnings announcements," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(2).
    18. Meyer, Andrew G., 2017. "The impact of education on political ideology: Evidence from European compulsory education reforms," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 9-23.
    19. Brian F. Tivnan & David Slater & James R. Thompson & Tobin A. Bergen-Hill & Carl D. Burke & Shaun M. Brady & Matthew T. K. Koehler & Matthew T. McMahon & Brendan F. Tivnan & Jason Veneman, 2018. "Price Discovery and the Accuracy of Consolidated Data Feeds in the U.S. Equity Markets," Papers 1810.11091, arXiv.org.
    20. Rif, Alexandru & Utz, Sebastian, 2021. "Short-term stock price reversals after extreme downward price movements," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 81(C), pages 123-133.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • G15 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - International Financial Markets
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • G23 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Non-bank Financial Institutions; Financial Instruments; Institutional Investors
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • K22 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law - - - Business and Securities Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:22551. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.