We study the profitability of traders in two fully electronic and highly liquid markets: the Dow and Standard & Poor׳s 500 e-mini futures markets. Using unique information that identify counterparties to a transaction, we show and seek to explain the fact that the network pattern of trades captures the relations between behavior in the market and returns. Our approach includes a simple representation of how much a shock is amplified by the network and how widely it is transmitted. This representation provides a possible shorthand for understanding the consequences of a fat-finger trade, a withdrawing of liquidity, or other market shock.

ABSTRACT Calls from practice suggest that audit committee members with industry expertise can improve audit committee effectiveness. Nevertheless, regulators and the extant literature have focused on the financial expertise of the audit committee. We posit that audit committee industry knowledge is valuable because accounting guidance, estimates, and oversight of the external auditor are often linked to a company's operations within a particular industry. Taking a holistic view, we examine two measures of financial reporting quality (financial restatements and discretionary accruals) and two measures of external auditor oversight (audit and nonaudit fees). As predicted, we find that audit committee members who are both accounting and industry experts perform better than those with only accounting expertise. We also find that in certain instances, supervisory experts who are also industry experts perform better than supervisory experts alone. Overall, these results suggest that industry expertise, when combined with accounting expertise, can improve the effectiveness of the audit committee in monitoring the financial reporting process. Data Availability: All data are gathered from publicly available sources.