Order flow is toxic when it adversely selects market makers, who may be unaware they are providing liquidity at a loss. We present a new procedure to estimate flow toxicity based on volume imbalance and trade intensity (the VPIN toxicity metric). VPIN is updated in volume-time, making it...

The ‘flash crash' of May 6th 2010 was the second largest point swing (1,010.14 points) and the biggest one-day point decline (998.5 points) in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. For a few minutes, $1 trillion in market value vanished. In this paper, we argue that the ‘flash...

Andersen and Bondarenko's paper “VPIN and the Flash Crash” is essentially a comment on our 2011 Journal of Portfolio Management paper using our measure of order toxicity, VPIN. Andersen and Bondarenko dispute our empirical findings and argue that VPIN essentially does not work. This is...

Liquidity occupies a central importance for many areas of finance. But there are very disparate views of liquidity, and correspondingly many different policy implications attached to these views. In this paper, I consider the many faces of liquidity and their implications for financial market...

We use a laboratory market to investigate how the ability to hide orders affects traders' strategies and market outcomes. We examine three market structures: Visible markets in which all orders must be displayed, Iceberg markets in which a minimum size must be displayed, and Hidden markets in...

We use a laboratory market to investigate how the ability to hide orders affects traders' strategies and market outcomes in a limit order book environment. We find that order strategies are greatly affected by allowing hidden liquidity, with traders substituting non-displayed for displayed...