Revealing High-Frequency Trading Provision of Liquidity with Visualization Michael Hirsch Dianne Cook Monash University Monash University Wellington Rd, Clayton VIC 3800, Australia Wellington Rd, Clayton VIC 3800 Australia
[email protected] [email protected] Paul Lajbcygier Rob Hyndman Monash University Monash University Wellington Rd, Clayton VIC 3800, Australia Wellington Rd, Clayton VIC 3800 Australia
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION Liquidity is crucial for successful financial markets. It ensures that all investors are able to buy and sell assets quickly at a fair price. This paper describes a visual exploration of the liquidity provision High Frequency Traders (HFTs) utilize sophisticated algorithms by high frequency traders (HFTs) on financial exchanges. operating with extreme speed and are frequently cited as liquidity Financial exchanges have morphed from ‘open outcry’ pits, providers. The objective of this paper is to investigate the liquidity physically populated by traders shouting orders to each other, to provision of a number of HFTs to determine their effects on their current form comprising warehouses of networked computer aggregate marketplace liquidity. We consider a large data set servers, silently matching orders generated by different traders’ collected from the Australian Securities Exchange throughout computer algorithms. These fast electronic financial exchanges 2013, providing a near complete picture of all trading activity. have transformed the business of trading