Two Trading Procedures Contrasted : One Filter and One Prism

The traditional trading procedure as adopted in centralized financial exchanges sets, at a point in time, the most competitive price as the single transaction price of all units of an asset consummated in trading. The counterfactual trading procedure introduced in this essay, in opposite, sets a plurality of shared value appraisals between buyers and sellers to form a spectrum of concurrent transaction prices. In the received view of a probabilistic asset price, the contrast shows that the traditional trading procedure works like a filter suppressing investors' all other value appraisals, whereas the counterfactual trading procedure works like a prism to reflect a spectrum of shared idiosyncratic appraisals. Transparency in price risk enabled by the prism-like trading procedure is shown to facilitate undistorted coordination and adjustment of investors' idiosyncratic value appraisals. The institutional source of recurring excess volatility in financial markets is thus traced to the unrecognized filter-like institutional frame the traditional trading procedure imposes on investment behaviors. This essay also elucidates the role of price discovery in coordinating idiosyncratic risk perceptions and its related issues