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Discussion Paper
Assessing the Price Impact of Treasury Market Workups
The price impact of a trade derives largely from its information content. The “workup” mechanism, a trading protocol used in the U.S. Treasury securities market, is designed to mitigate the instantaneous price impact of a trade by allowing market participants to trade additional quantities of a security after a buyer and seller first agree on its price. Nevertheless, workup trades are not necessarily free of information. In this post, we assess the role of workups in price discovery, following our recent paper in the Review of Asset Pricing Studies (an earlier version of which was ...
Discussion Paper
Price Impact of Trades and Orders in the U.S. Treasury Securities Market
It’s long been known that asset prices respond not only to public information, such as macroeconomic announcements, but also to private information revealed through trading. More recently, with the growth of high-frequency trading, academics have argued that limit orders—orders to buy or sell a security at a specific price or better—also contain information. In this post, we examine the information content of trades and limit orders in the U.S. Treasury securities market, following this paper, recently published in the Journal of Financial Markets and earlier as a New York Fed staff ...
Report
Tick Size, Competition for Liquidity Provision, and Price Discovery: Evidence from the U.S. Treasury Market
This paper studies how a tick size change affects market quality, price discovery, and the competition for liquidity provision by dealers and high-frequency trading firms (HFTs) in the U.S. Treasury market. Employing difference-in-differences regressions around the November 19, 2018 tick size reduction in the two-year Treasury note and a similar change for the two-year futures eight weeks later, we find significantly improved market quality. Moreover, dealers become more competitive in liquidity provision and price improvement, consistent with the hypothesis that HFTs find liquidity provision ...
Report
The microstructure of a U.S. Treasury ECN: the BrokerTec platform
We assess the microstructure of the U.S. Treasury securities market following its migration to electronic trading. We model price discovery using a vector autoregression model of price and order flow. We show that both trades and limit orders affect price dynamics, suggesting that traders also choose limit orders to exploit their information. Moreover, while limit orders have smaller price impact, their greater variation contributes more to the variance of price updates. Lastly, we find increased price impact of trades and especially limit orders following major announcements (such as FOMC ...
Discussion Paper
How Does Tick Size Affect Treasury Market Quality?
The popularity of U.S. Treasury securities as a means of pricing other securities, managing interest rate risk, and storing value is, in part, due to the efficiency and liquidity of the U.S. Treasury market. Any structural changes that might affect these attributes of the market are therefore of interest to market participants and policymakers alike. In this post, we consider how a 2018 change in the minimum price increment, or tick size, for the 2-year U.S. Treasury note affected market quality, following our recently updated New York Fed staff report.
Report
Price and size discovery in financial markets: evidence from the U.S. Treasury securities market
We study the workup protocol, an important size discovery mechanism in the U.S. Treasury securities market. We find that shocks in workup order flow explain 6-8 percent of the variation of returns on benchmark notes and, across maturities, contribute 10 percent to the variation of the yield curve level factor. Information related to proprietary client order flow is more likely to show up in workup trades, whereas information derived from public announcements is more likely to come through pre-workup (or “lit”) trades. Our findings highlight how the nature of information affects the ...
Report
Liquidity and volatility in the U.S. treasury market
We model the joint dynamics of intraday liquidity, volume, and volatility in the U.S. Treasury market, especially through the 2007-09 financial crisis and around important economic announcements. Using various specifications based on Bauwens and Giot?s (2000) Log- ACD(1,1) model, we find that liquidity, volume, and volatility are highly persistent, with volatility having a lower short-term persistence than the other two. Market liquidity and volume are important to explaining volatility dynamics but not vice versa. In addition, market dynamics change during the financial crisis, with all ...
Report
How do treasury dealers manage their positions?
Using thirty-one years of data (1990–2020) on U.S. Treasury dealer positions, we find that Treasury issuance is the main driver of dealers’ weekly inventory changes. Such inventory fluctuations are only partially offset in adjacent weeks and not significantly hedged with futures. Dealers are compensated for inventory risk by means of subsequent price appreciation of their holdings. Amid increased balance sheet costs attributable to post-crisis regulatory changes, dealers significantly reduce their position taking and lay off inventory faster. Moreover, the increased participation of ...