Trading on the Floor after Sweeping the Book

Abstract: Informed traders need to trade fast in order to profit from their private information before it becomes public. Fast electronic markets provide such liquidity. Slow markets provide execution in an auction based trading floor. Hybrid markets combine both execution venues. In its main result, the paper shows that to compensate for their slow and risky executions, trading floors need to be at least twice as deep as the sweeping facility. Furthermore, when a stand-alone trading floor is enhanced with the addition of a sweeping facility, overall informed trading will decline because it is easier for informed traders to extract the full value of their private info.