We study the effects that the ban on short sales of shares in financial firms introduced in late 2008 and removed early 2009 had on the microstructure and the quality of UK equity markets. We show that the ban did nothing to affect order flows: financial stocks were being more aggressively sold...

We explore the information content of counterparty identities and how their disclosure can be exploited by other investors in a post-trade transparent market. Using data from the Helsinki Stock Exchange, we form dynamic mean-variance strategies with daily rebalancing which condition on the net...