The price discovery and price leadership of foreign investors: Evidence from Taiwan futures markets Wei-Kuang Chen Professor, Department of Money and Banking, National Chengchi University Ching-Ting Lin* Assistant professor, Department of Money and Banking, National Chengchi University Cheng-Yi Shiu Professor, Department of Finance, National Central University Abstract Using a unique dataset composed of comprehensive transaction data from Taiwan futures markets, we classify all investors into individuals, domestic institutions, and foreigners, and examine the price discovery and price leadership for these three groups. We find that, despite the relatively low trading volume of futures contracts by foreigners, such trades make a significant contribution to price discovery. Moreover, intraday analysis shows that foreigners’ correlated trades can positively predict concurrent and future price movements of futures contracts. The empirical result indicates that foreigners have an information advantage in Taiwan futures markets. In contrast to foreigners, individuals make the least contribution to price discovery and their correlated trades negatively predict the following price movements, suggesting that individuals have an information disadvantage. Keywords: Price discovery; Price leadership; Herding; Foreigners; Information role *Corresponding author. Department of Money and Banking, College of Commerce, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., Tel: +886-2-29393091 ext. 81248, Email:
[email protected]. 1 1. Introduction Literature on the informational role of foreign investors expresses diverse views. One tranche of literature asserts that domestic investors are more knowledgeable than foreign investors about the local environment or domestic firms. For example, Choe, Kho, and Stulz (2005) analyze all trades in the Korean stock market and find that domestic investors are better able to select winners than foreigners.