With the demise of traditional market makers and proliferation of trade execution algorithms that mix market and limit orders, it is no longer clear who provides liquidity in limit order book markets and what determines their liquidity provision decisions. To examine these issues, we develop and...

This paper examines how gambling-motivated trading affects aggregate financial market outcomes. Using a unique global gambling data set covering 39 countries, we show that the dollar volume of stock market gambling is at least 3.5 times the combined volume of “traditional” gambling outlets...

We show that cryptocurrency markets are plagued by pump-and-dump manipulation, with at least 355 cases in seven months. Unlike stock market manipulators, cryptocurrency manipulators openly declare their intentions to pump specific coins, rather than trying to deceive investors. Puzzlingly,...

In this chapter, I describe the various forms of market manipulation, ranging from classical pump and dump schemes, bear raids, and painting the tape, through to recent forms of manipulation such as spoofing, layering, pinging, and quote stuffing. I discuss the defining elements of market...

We investigate which of the two main centers of gold trading — the London spot market and the New York futures market — plays a more important role in setting the price of gold. Using intraday data during a 17-year period we find that although both markets contribute to price discovery, the...

We exploit a unique natural experiment—recent restrictions of dark trading in Canada and Australia—and proprietary trade-level data to analyze the effects of dark trading. Disaggregating two types of dark trading, we find that dark limit order markets are beneficial to market quality,...

We investigate the new reality of exchange-traded funds (ETFs). We show that many ETFs are active investments in form (designed to generate alpha) or function (serve as building blocks of active portfolios). The median ETF has an Activeness Index of 93.1%. Active-in-form ETFs have positive...

We examine the welfare costs of informed trade in a new sequential trade model with elastic uninformed traders. Welfare losses occur when the liquidity costs of executing a trade exceed the potential gains from the trade. With long-lived private information, more informed traders lead to better...

We show that behind the aggregate effects of algorithmic and high-frequency traders (AT/HFT) is substantial heterogeneity in how individual algorithms impact institutional trading costs. Using unique trader-identified regulatory data, we find that the cluster of “harmful” algorithmic traders...