Foreign Exchange Auction Markets

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.

ROBERT A. SCHWARTZ The primary objective of this book is to consider how the inclusion of electronic call auction trading would affect the performance of our U.S. equity markets. The papers it contains focus on the call auction and its role in a hybrid market struc ture. The purpose is to increase understanding of this trading environment, and to consider the design of a more efficient stock market. This book had its origin in a symposium, Electronic Call Market Trading, that was held at New York University's Salomon Center on April 20, 1995. Nearly 150 people from 16 different countries attended. At the time, three proprietary trading systems based on call auction principles (The Arizona Stock Exchange, Posit, and Instinet's Crossing Network) had been operating for several years and interest already existed in the procedure. Since the symposium, increasing use has been made of call auctions, primarily by the ParisBourse in its Nouveau Marchi: and CAC markets, by Deutsche Borse in its Xetra market, and in the U.S. by OptiMark. Rather than being used as stand alone systems, however, call auctions are now being interfaced with continuous markets so as to produce hybrid market structures, a development that is given considerable attention to in a number of the chapters in this book.

This book focuses on markets organized as double auctions in which both buyers and sellers can submit bids and asks for standardized units of well-defined commodities and securities. It examines evidence from the laboratory and computer simulations.

This book is based on the proceedings of The Electronic Call Auction: New Answers to Old Questions, a conference hosted by the Zicklin School of Business on May 16, 2000. The text includes the edited transcripts of the panel discussions and separate addresses by three major industry executives Douglas M. Atkin, formerly President and CEO, Instinet Corporation; Kenneth D. Pasternak, formerly President and CEO, Knight/Trimark Group, Inc., and William J. Brodsky, Chairman and CEO, Chicago Board Options Exchange. The electronic call auction is an important trading vehicle in many market centers around the world, but is not well understood in the US. What are call auctions? How should they be designed and integrated with continuous trading in a hybrid market structure? As call auctions play a more central role in the US markets, how will they affect market quality in terms of transparency, order flow consolidation, and price discovery? These and other critical questions were asked at the conference while the efficiency of the US markets was broadly assessed.