Price Impact and Venue Dependence

Abstract: The equity trading of today is fragmented across regulated markets (RMs) and multilateral trading facilities (MTFs). Despite being legally very similar Busch (2017), market participants have reported that they attract different types of traders. Market dynamics arise from the interactions between all market participants (agents) Kyle (1985). Price impact is an important part of these dynamics which, for the most part, can be explained by the competition between liquidity takers and liquidity providers Bouchaud et al. (2009). Hence, this thesis studies whether price impact is venue dependent by using the transient impact model, developed by Bouchaud et al. (2004), on Nordic stocks listed at Nasdaq but also traded on London based MTFs. Furthermore, MiFID II and entailing legislation introduced a considerable amount of changes to the financial markets, the effects of which on price impact will also be subject to investigation here. The findings indicate that price impact is indeed venue dependent, where RMs show less price impact than the MTFs. The effects of MiFID II are vague but seems to have lowered the temporal aspect of price impact for the MTFs, while the effects on the RMs are less evident.