Conjuncted: Speculatively Accelerated Capital – Trading Outside the Pit.

High Frequency Traders (HFTs hereafter) may anticipate the trades of a mutual fund, for instance, if the mutual fund splits large orders into a series of smaller ones and the initial trades reveal information about the mutual funds’ future trading intentions. HFTs might also forecast order flow if traditional asset managers with similar trading demands do not all trade at the same time, allowing the possibility that the initiation of a trade by one mutual fund could forecast similar future trades by other mutual funds. If an HFT were able to forecast a traditional asset managers’ order flow by either these or some other means, then the HFT could potentially trade ahead of them and profit from the traditional asset manager’s subsequent price impact.

There are two main empirical implications of HFTs engaging in such a trading strategy. The first implication is that HFT trading should lead non-HFT trading – if an HFT buys a stock, non-HFTs should subsequently come into the market and buy those same stocks. Second, since the HFT’s objective would be to profit from non-HFTs’ subsequent price impact, it should be the case that the prices of the stocks they buy rise and those of the stocks they sell fall. These two patterns, together, are consistent with HFTs trading stocks in order to profit from non-HFTs’ future buying and selling pressure. 

While HFTs may in aggregate anticipate non-HFT order flow, it is also possible that among HFTs, some firms’ trades are strongly correlated with future non-HFT order flow, while other firms’ trades have little or no correlation with non-HFT order flow. This may be the case if certain HFTs focus more on strategies that anticipate order flow or if some HFTs are more skilled than other firms. If certain HFTs are better at forecasting order flow or if they focus more on such a strategy, then these HFTs’ trades should be consistently more strongly correlated with future non-HFT trades than are trades from other HFTs. Additionally, if these HFTs are more skilled, then one might expect these HFTs’ trades to be more strongly correlated with future returns. 

Another implication of the anticipatory trading hypothesis is that the correlation between HFT trades and future non-HFT trades should be stronger at times when non-HFTs are impatient. The reason is anticipating buying and selling pressure requires forecasting future trades based on patterns in past trades and orders. To make anticipating their order flow difficult, non-HFTs typically use execution algorithms to disguise their trading intentions. But there is a trade-off between disguising order flow and trading a large position quickly. When non-HFTs are impatient and focused on trading a position quickly, they may not hide their order flow as well, making it easier for HFTs to anticipate their trades. At such times, the correlation between HFT trades and future non-HFT trades should be stronger. 

If there are common trading patterns among firms, then the HFT and non-HFT trading measures will be contemporaneously correlated. This might be the case if, for instance, firms in the HFT and non-HFT samples use the same trading signals. If there is also serial correlation in these trading patterns, then HFT trading will predict non-HFT trading simply because it is a noisy proxy for lagged non-HFT trading. If this explanation is driving a lead-lag relationship between HFT and non-HFT trading and the form is such that HFT trading is non-HFT trading plus noise, then the lead-lag relationship between the two variables will go away after controlling for lagged non-HFT trading.