Browsing by Author "van Kervel, Vincent"

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    High-Frequency Trading around Large Institutional Orders
    (2019) van Kervel, Vincent; Menkveld, Albert J.
    Liquidity suppliers lean against the wind. We analyze whether high-frequency traders (HFTs) lean against large institutional orders that execute through a series of child orders. The alternative is HFTs trading with the wind, that is, in the same direction. We find that HFTs initially lean against these orders but eventually change direction and take positions in the same direction for the most informed institutional orders. Our empirical findings are consistent with investors trading strategically on their information. When deciding trade intensity, they seem to trade off higher speculative profits against higher risk of being detected and preyed on by HFTs.
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    Order splitting and interacting with a counterparty
    (2023) van Kervel, Vincent; Kwan, Amy; Westerholm, P. Joakim
    Institutional investors have a strong incentive to find natural counterparties to be able to trade larger amounts at lower costs. We show theoretically that order splitting allows institutional investors to gradually detect each other's trading intentions, such that they can coordinate their trading to maximize gains from trade. Empirically, we confirm that investors detect counterparties in real-time and adjust their trading rate accordingly. The economic magnitudes are sizeable, as a one-standard deviation increase in natural counterparty trading volume correlates with a 11.9% increase in parent order size and a 86% reduction in average implementation shortfall.
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    Price impact versus bid-ask spreads in the index option market
    (2022) Kaeck, Andreas; van Kervel, Vincent; Seeger, Norman J.
    We investigate the puzzle of why bid-ask spreads of options are so large by focussing on the price impact component of the spread. We propose a structural vector autoregressive model for trades in the option market to analyze whether they move the underlying price and/or the underlying's volatility. Our model captures cross-option strategies by pooling order flows across contracts after a decomposition into exposure to the underlying asset and its volatility. While our estimates confirm that S&P500 option trades indeed significantly move the underlying and the volatility, the economic magnitudes are very small. Hence, large bid-ask spreads of options remain a puzzle.