LIQUIDITY OF FUTURES MARKETS OVER THE LAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY: TECHNOLOGY & MARKET STRUCTURE VERSUS ECONOMIC INFLUENCES

This study examines the major technological and market forces that have acted on the liquidity of futures markets over almost the last quarter of a century – equivalent to Professor Robert Webb’s tenor as Editor-in-Chief at the Journal of Futures Markets. We examine the impact of electronic trading replacing open outcry, the impact of high-frequency trading and co-located trading, compare the liquidity impacts of these developments with the impact of major economic events, including the Global Financial Crisis and Covid-19 Pandemic. Using a stock index futures contract traded on Australian futures exchanges as an example, we find that technological advances have had a statistically significant but almost imperceptible influence on measures of liquidity of Australian futures contracts. In contrast, economic crises, and crashes such as the Global Financial Crash and the Covid-19 crash have had a massive and sustained impact on the liquidity of futures markets. Our results suggest that liquidity effects from technological innovations, while important, remain dwarfed by those from extreme outlier events.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

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