Intraday Price Formation in U.S. Equity Index Markets
- Abstract
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- Author(s): Joel Hasbrouck
- Published: Nov 07, 2003
- Pages: 2375-2400
- DOI: 10.1046/j.1540-6261.2003.00609.x
Abstract
The market for U.S. equity indexes presently comprises floor‐traded index futures contracts, exchange‐traded funds (ETFs), electronically traded, small‐denomination futures contracts (E‐minis), and sector ETFs that decompose the S&P 500 index into component industry portfolios. This paper empirically investigates price discovery in this environment. For the S&P 500 and Nasdaq‐100 indexes, most of the price discovery occurs in the E‐mini market. For the S&P 400 MidCap index, price discovery is shared between the regular futures contract and the ETF. The S&P 500 ETF contributes markedly to price discovery in the sector ETFs, but there are only minor effects in the reverse direction.