Traders and time: who moves the market?

Abstract

Purpose – This paper is aimed to investigate the impact of different categories of traders on price and volume durations at Euronext Paris. The two series are respectively related to the instantaneous volatility and the market liquidity; hence, they are particularly suited to test microstructure hypotheses. Design/methodology/approach – A Log-autoregressive conditional duration model was adopted to include the information on the traders’ identity at the transaction level. High-frequency data were used and how the informed traders and the liquidity provider affect the arrival of market events was studied. The robustness of our results was also checked by testing different distributions and controlling for microstructure effects. Findings – It was found that informed traders and the liquidity provider exert a dominant role in accelerating the market activity. This result depends on the state of the market, i.e. it is effective only during periods of high frequency of transactions. The estimates for price durations show that a high instantaneous volatility can be mainly ascribed to a great concentration of informed traders. Informed traders are also found to shorten volume durations by clustering small-size orders to disguise their private signal. For both durations, the liquidity provider is also found to foster the market activity, likely because of his contractual duties. Originality/value – The article is of interest for researchers in the field of market microstructure, as well as for specialists in the high-frequency trading. Results provide an empirical confirmation of information models which theorize an accelerating effect for informed trading. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first contribution to study the impact of traders’categories at the transaction level and with different definitions of durations.