IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/bergec/2017_007.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Anonymous trading in equities

Author

Listed:

Abstract

I explore a reform at the Oslo Stock Exchange to assess the causal effect of trader anonymity on liquidity and trading volume. Using a regression discontinuity approach, I find that anonymity leads to a reduction in bid-ask spreads by 40% and an increase in trading volume by more than 50%. The increase in trading volume is mostly accounted for by an increase in trading activity by institutional investors. These results are consistent with theoretical frameworks where informed traders supply and improve liquidity in anonymous markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Grimstvedt Meling, Tom, 2017. "Anonymous trading in equities," Working Papers in Economics 7/17, University of Bergen, Department of Economics.
  • Handle: RePEc:hhs:bergec:2017_007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://ekstern.filer.uib.no/svf/2017/wp%2007-17.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Comerton-Forde, Carole & Frino, Alex & Mollica, Vito, 2005. "The impact of limit order anonymity on liquidity: Evidence from Paris, Tokyo and Korea," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 57(6), pages 528-540.
    2. Pietro Perotti & Barbara Rindi, 2006. "Market for Information and Identity Disclosure in an Experimental Open Limit Order Book," Economic Notes, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA, vol. 35(1), pages 97-119, February.
    3. David S. Lee & Thomas Lemieux, 2010. "Regression Discontinuity Designs in Economics," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 48(2), pages 281-355, June.
    4. Trond M. Døskeland & Hans K. Hvide, 2011. "Do Individual Investors Have Asymmetric Information Based on Work Experience?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(3), pages 1011-1041, June.
    5. Brad M. Barber & Terrance Odean & Ning Zhu, 2009. "Do Retail Trades Move Markets?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(1), pages 151-186, January.
    6. Thierry Foucault & Sophie Moinas & Erik Theissen, 2007. "Does Anonymity Matter in Electronic Limit Order Markets?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(5), pages 1707-1747, 2007 28.
    7. Juhani T. Linnainmaa & Gideon Saar, 2012. "Lack of Anonymity and the Inference from Order Flow," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 25(5), pages 1414-1456.
    8. Stephanie Riegg Cellini & Fernando Ferreira & Jesse Rothstein, 2010. "The Value of School Facility Investments: Evidence from a Dynamic Regression Discontinuity Design," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(1), pages 215-261.
    9. Foucault, Thierry & Pagano, Marco & Roell, Ailsa, 2013. "Market Liquidity: Theory, Evidence, and Policy," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199936243.
    10. Yen-Cheng Chang & Harrison Hong & Inessa Liskovich, 2015. "Regression Discontinuity and the Price Effects of Stock Market Indexing," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 28(1), pages 212-246.
    11. Bloomfield, Robert & O'Hara, Maureen & Saar, Gideon, 2005. "The "make or take" decision in an electronic market: Evidence on the evolution of liquidity," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 75(1), pages 165-199, January.
    12. James J. Angel & Lawrence E. Harris & Chester S. Spatt, 2011. "Equity Trading in the 21stCentury," Quarterly Journal of Finance (QJF), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 1(01), pages 1-53.
    13. Comerton-Forde, Carole & Putniņš, Tālis J. & Tang, Kar Mei, 2011. "Why Do Traders Choose to Trade Anonymously?," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 46(4), pages 1025-1049, August.
    14. Erik Theissen, 2003. "Trader Anonymity, Price Formation and Liquidity," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 7(1), pages 1-26.
    15. Alexandra Hachmeister & Dirk Schiereck, 2010. "Dancing in the dark: post-trade anonymity, liquidity and informed trading," Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting, Springer, vol. 34(2), pages 145-177, February.
    16. Huddart, Steven & Hughes, John S & Levine, Carolyn B, 2001. "Public Disclosure and Dissimulation of Insider Trades," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(3), pages 665-681, May.
    17. Boone, Audra L. & White, Joshua T., 2015. "The effect of institutional ownership on firm transparency and information production," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(3), pages 508-533.
    18. Brad M. Barber & Terrance Odean, 2008. "All That Glitters: The Effect of Attention and News on the Buying Behavior of Individual and Institutional Investors," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 21(2), pages 785-818, April.
    19. Harris, Lawrence E & Gurel, Eitan, 1986. "Price and Volume Effects Associated with Changes in the S&P 500 List: New Evidence for the Existence of Price Pressures," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(4), pages 815-829, September.
    20. Lee, David S., 2008. "Randomized experiments from non-random selection in U.S. House elections," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 142(2), pages 675-697, February.
    21. Pierre Collin-Dufresne & Vyacheslav Fos, 2015. "Do Prices Reveal the Presence of Informed Trading?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(4), pages 1555-1582, August.
    22. Kenneth R. Ahern & Amy K. Dittmar, 2012. "The Changing of the Boards: The Impact on Firm Valuation of Mandated Female Board Representation," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 127(1), pages 137-197.
    23. Lee, David S. & Card, David, 2008. "Regression discontinuity inference with specification error," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 142(2), pages 655-674, February.
    24. Hachmeister, A. & Schiereck, D., 2010. "Dancing in the Dark: Post-trade Anonymity, Liquidity, and Informed Trading," Publications of Darmstadt Technical University, Institute for Business Studies (BWL) 34883, Darmstadt Technical University, Department of Business Administration, Economics and Law, Institute for Business Studies (BWL).
    25. Hahn, Jinyong & Todd, Petra & Van der Klaauw, Wilbert, 2001. "Identification and Estimation of Treatment Effects with a Regression-Discontinuity Design," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(1), pages 201-209, January.
    26. Alex Boulatov & Thomas J. George, 2013. "Hidden and Displayed Liquidity in Securities Markets with Informed Liquidity Providers," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 26(8), pages 2096-2137.
    27. Randi Næs & Johannes A. Skjeltorp & Bernt Arne Ødegaard, 2011. "Stock Market Liquidity and the Business Cycle," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 66(1), pages 139-176, February.
    28. Werner, Ingrid M. & Wen, Yuanji & Rindi, Barbara & Consonni, Francesco & Buti, Sabrina, 2015. "Tick Size: Theory and Evidence," Working Paper Series 2015-04, Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics.
    29. Comerton-Forde, Carole & Tang, Kar Mei, 2009. "Anonymity, liquidity and fragmentation," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 12(3), pages 337-367, August.
    30. Barbara Rindi, 2008. "Informed Traders as Liquidity Providers: Anonymity, Liquidity and Price Formation," Review of Finance, European Finance Association, vol. 12(3), pages 497-532.
    31. Katya Malinova & Andreas Park, 2015. "Subsidizing Liquidity: The Impact of Make/Take Fees on Market Quality," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(2), pages 509-536, April.
    32. Shleifer, Andrei, 1986. "Do Demand Curves for Stocks Slope Down?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 41(3), pages 579-590, July.
    33. Lee, Charles M. C. & Radhakrishna, Balkrishna, 2000. "Inferring investor behavior: Evidence from TORQ data," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 83-111, May.
    34. Pierre Collin-Dufresne & Vyacheslav Fos, 2013. "Do Prices Reveal the Presence of Informed Trading?," Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper Series 13-69, Swiss Finance Institute, revised Sep 2015.
    35. David Hirshleifer & Sonya Seongyeon Lim & Siew Hong Teoh, 2009. "Driven to Distraction: Extraneous Events and Underreaction to Earnings News," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 64(5), pages 2289-2325, October.
    36. Friederich, Sylvain & Payne, Richard, 2014. "Trading anonymity and order anticipation," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 1-24.
    37. Jørgensen, Kjell & Skjeltorp, Johannes Atle & Ødegaard, Bernt Arne, 2014. "Throttling hyperactive robots - Message to trade ratios at the Oslo Stock Exchange," UiS Working Papers in Economics and Finance 2014/3, University of Stavanger.
    38. Bessembinder, Hendrik, 2003. "Trade Execution Costs and Market Quality after Decimalization," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 38(4), pages 747-777, December.
    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. Tom Grimstvedt Meling, 2021. "Anonymous Trading in Equities," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 76(2), pages 707-754, April.
    2. Dennis, Patrick J. & Sandås, Patrik, 2020. "Does Trading Anonymously Enhance Liquidity?," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 55(7), pages 2372-2396, November.
    3. Dennis, Patrick J. & Sandås, Patrik, 2014. "Does Trading Anonymously Enhance Liquidity?," Working Paper Series 288, Sveriges Riksbank (Central Bank of Sweden).
    4. Duong, Huu Nhan & Lajbcygier, Paul & Lu, Jerry Shuai & Vu, Van Hoang, 2018. "The effect of anonymity on price efficiency: Evidence from the removal of broker identities," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 95-107.
    5. Duong, Huu Nhan & Kalev, Petko S., 2013. "Anonymity and order submissions," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 25(C), pages 101-118.
    6. 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.
    7. Thu Phuong Pham, 2015. "Broker ID transparency and price impact of trades: evidence from the Korean Exchange," International Journal of Managerial Finance, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 11(1), pages 117-131, February.
    8. Gozluklu, Arie E., 2016. "Pre-trade transparency and informed trading: Experimental evidence on undisclosed orders," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 28(C), pages 91-115.
    9. Joel Peress & Daniel Schmidt, 2020. "Glued to the TV: Distracted Noise Traders and Stock Market Liquidity," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 75(2), pages 1083-1133, April.
    10. He, Yinghua & Nielsson, Ulf & Guo, Hong & Yang, Jiong, 2014. "Subscribing to transparency," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 189-206.
    11. Peress, Joel & Schmidt, Daniel, 2021. "Noise traders incarnate: Describing a realistic noise trading process," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 54(C).
    12. Tse-Chun Lin & Qi Liu & Bo Sun, 2019. "Contractual Managerial Incentives with Stock Price Feedback," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 109(7), pages 2446-2468, July.
    13. Pham, Thu Phuong & Westerholm, P. Joakim, 2013. "A survey of research into broker identity and limit order book," Working Papers 17212, University of Tasmania, Tasmanian School of Business and Economics, revised 16 Oct 2013.
    14. Friederich, Sylvain & Payne, Richard, 2014. "Trading anonymity and order anticipation," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 21(C), pages 1-24.
    15. Murphy Jun Jie Lee, 2013. "The Microstructure of Trading Processes on the Singapore Exchange," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 2-2013, January-A.
    16. de Frutos, M. Ángeles & Manzano, Carolina, 2014. "Market transparency, market quality, and sunshine trading," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 17(C), pages 174-198.
    17. Bartalotti, Otávio C. & Calhoun, Gray & He, Yang, 2016. "Bootstrap Confidence Intervals for Sharp Regression Discontinuity Designs with the Uniform Kernel," Staff General Research Papers Archive 3394, Iowa State University, Department of Economics.
    18. Yen-Cheng Chang & Harrison Hong & Inessa Liskovich, 2015. "Regression Discontinuity and the Price Effects of Stock Market Indexing," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 28(1), pages 212-246.
    19. Jagjeev Dosanjh, 2017. "Exchange Initiatives and Market Efficiency: Evidence from the Australian Securities Exchange," PhD Thesis, Finance Discipline Group, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, number 1-2017, January-A.
    20. Charles Cao & Matthew Gustafson & Raisa Velthuis, 2019. "Index Membership and Small Firm Financing," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 65(9), pages 4156-4178, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Equity Trading; Limit Order Markets; Anonymous trading;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G10 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - General (includes Measurement and Data)
    • G20 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - General

    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:hhs:bergec:2017_007. 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: Kjell Erik Lommerud (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iouibno.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.