Institutional high frequency trading and price discovery: Evidence from an emerging commodity futures market

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Inc

E-ISSN: 1096-9934|38|2|243-270

ISSN: 0270-7314

Source: THE JOURNAL OF FUTURES MARKETS, Vol.38, Iss.2, 2018-02, pp. : 243-270

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Abstract

We compare the effects of institutional and individual trading on intraday price processes in the emerging commodity futures market of China with a unique trade‐by‐trade dataset. Institutional investors collectively facilitate price discovery with positive permanent price impacts, but their beneficial role is time agglomerated, that is, only institutional highly‐concentrated trades executed at the same millisecond are accompanied by information effects. Transitory price disturbances are mitigated by informed institutional highly‐concentrated trading in the agricultural sector, whereas these disturbances are alleviated by liquidity‐enhancing individual trading in the industrial sector. Overall, the entire market is abnormally dominated by transitory volatility instead of informational volatility.