High-speed market connections and information processing improve the ability to seize trading opportunities, raising gains from trade. They also enable fast traders to process information before slow traders, generating adverse selection, and thus negative externalities. When investing in...

We show that product differentiation reduces the informativeness of a firm's stock price (or its peers' stock prices) about the value of its growth opportunities. This results in less efficient exercise of a firm's growth options when managers rely on information in stock prices for their...

Short lived arbitrage opportunities arise when prices adjust with a lag to new information. They are toxic because they expose dealers to the risk of trading at stale quotes. Hence, theory implies that more frequent toxic arbitrage opportunities and a faster arbitrageurs' response to these...

Information processing filters out the noise in data but it takes time. Hence, low precision signals are available before high precision signals. We analyze how this feature affects asset price informativeness when investors can acquire signals of increasing precision over time about the payoff...

We compare the optimal trading strategy of an informed speculator when he can trade ahead of incoming news (is "fast"), versus when he cannot (is "slow"). We find that speed matters: the fast speculator's trades account for a larger fraction of trading volume, and are more correlated with...

We analyze the effect of alternative data on the informativeness of financial forecasts. Our hypothesis is that the emergence of alternative data increases the net benefit of collecting short-term information about firms' cash flows more than the benefit of collecting long-term information. If...

We analyze how computing power and data abundance affect speculators' search for predictors. In our model, speculators search for predictors through trials and optimally stop searching when they find a predictor with a signal-to-noise ratio larger than an endogenous threshold. Greater computing...

Firms significantly reduce their investment in response to non-fundamental drops in the stock price of their product-market peers. We argue that this result arises because of managers' limited ability to filter out the noise in stock prices when using them as signals about their investment...

We use clickstream data to show that investors' demand for information about macroeconomic factors affecting the path of future interest rates is a measure of their uncertainty about this path. In particular, an increase in information demand ahead of influential economic announcements affecting...