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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 136 No. 1 2020

The term structure of liquidity provision

Jennifer Conrad1; Sunil Wahal2

1 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · 2 Arizona State University

Abstract

We examine realized spreads and price impact in clock and trade time following each trade in all common stocks from 2010 to 2017. The term structure of realized spreads (price impact) is sharply downward (upward) sloping, implying that (a) market maker profitability is sensitive to speed, and (b) the choice of the horizon of measurement is critical when drawing inferences from spread decompositions. The majority of the price impact of trades in large (small)-capitalization stocks takes place within 15 (60) seconds. Net profits to liquidity provision, or equivalently, net costs to liquidity demanders, decline over the sample period even at the shortest horizons that we consider: at the 100 ms horizon, aggregate profits decline from 1.9 basis points of total dollar volume in 2010 to 1.0 basis points in 2017.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2019.09.008
Volume
136
Issue
1
Pages
239-259
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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