By partitioning quoted depth into the specialist's contribution and the limit order book's contribution, the paper investigates whether specialists manage quoted depth to reduce adverse selection risk. The results show that both specialists and limit order traders reduce depth around information events, thereby reducing their exposure to adverse selection costs. Moreover, specialists' quotes may reflect only the limit order book on the side (or sides) of the market where they believe there is a chance of informed trading. Changes in quoted depth are consistent with specialists managing their inventory as well as having knowledge of the stock's future value.

Using limit order data provided by the NYSE, we investigate the impact of reducing the minimum tick size on the liquidity of the market. While both spreads and depths (quoted and on the limit order book) declined after the NYSE's change from eighths to sixteenths, depth declined throughout the entire limit order book as well. The combined effect of smaller spreads and reduced cumulative limit order book depth has made liquidity demanders trading small orders better off; however, traders who submitted larger orders in lower volume stocks did not benefit, especially if those stocks were low priced.

Investors rebalance their portfolios as their views about expected returns and risk change. We use empirical measures of portfolio rebalancing to back out investors' views, specifically, their views about the state of the economy. We show that aggregate portfolio rebalancing across equity sectors is consistent with sector rotation, an investment strategy that exploits perceived differences in the relative performance of sectors at different stages of the business cycle. The empirical footprint of sector rotation has predictive power for the evolution of the economy and future bond market returns, even after controlling for relative sector returns. Contrary to many theories of price formation, trading activity, therefore, contains information that is not entirely revealed by resulting relative price changes. The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

The apparent conflict between the level of resources dedicated to technical analysis by practitioners and academic theories of market efficiency is a long-standing puzzle. We explore a previously unexamined feature of technical analysis — namely its relation to liquidity provision. We demonstrate that support and resistance levels coincide with peaks in depth on the limit order book and moving average forecasts reveal information about the relative position of depth on the book. Furthermore, we show that these relationships stem from technical rules locating depth already in place on the limit order book.

New York Stock Exchange specialists disseminate information to market participants by displaying price schedules consisting of bid prices, ask prices, bid depths, and ask depths. We examine how specialists update these price schedules in a simultaneous equations model. We find that changes in the best prices and depths on the limit order book have a significant impact on the posted price schedule, while the effects of transactions and order activity are secondary. Furthermore, we show that specialists revise prices and depths differently, but find no evidence that they revise the price schedule in response to changes in inventory.