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This book puts economics to work on the daily problems faced by investors, traders, speculators, and brokers as they wrestle with increasingly diverse and complex financial markets. Drawing mainly on data direct from the financial behavior of households, corporations, and governments in the USA, the authors show how accessible but rigorous economics can help in making sense of the financial markets (including those in equities, bonds, mutual funds, options, and futures) and of the ways in which these markets are organized. The authors contend that many of the approaches that might seem random or counter‐intuitive at first sight are in fact rational and often predictable responses to events – but they also find that real markets stray from the rational economic path – financial markets make mistakes, and inefficiencies do exist. When they do, unique profit opportunities arise that the authors demonstrate throughout the book. The book differs from many works on financial markets in that it provides a systematic framework for analyzing the impact of events on security prices and trading volumes; explains how the value of a firm's assets and dividend flow will influence the prices of its securities; provides the tools to identify and manage different types of risk; discusses what protection investors can expect from financial market regulators and what happens when a clique tries to squeeze or corner a market; includes a detailed treatment of futures and their role at the core of today's financial markets, and explains why they should be of concern to more and more investors and traders; shows how to use modern corporate strategy tools in security analysis; and shows how to discover inefficiencies in financial markets and profit from them. By bringing together information on the institutional details of financial markets with the concepts and tools of economic theory, the book will be of value to practitioners and students of financial markets alike.

The way in which securities are traded is very different from the idealized picture of a frictionless and self-equilibrating market offered by the typical finance textbook. This book offers a more accurate and authoritative take on liquidity and price discovery. The book starts from the assumption that not everyone is present at all times simultaneously on the market, and that even the limited number of participants who are there have quite diverse information about the security's fundamentals. As a result, the order flow is a complex mix of information and noise, and a consensus price only emerges gradually over time as the trading process evolves and the participants interpret the actions of other traders. Thus, a security's actual transaction price may deviate from its fundamental value, as it would be assessed by a fully informed set of investors. This book takes these deviations seriously, and explains why and how they emerge in the trading process and are eventually eliminated. The book draws on a vast body of theoretical insights and empirical findings on security price formation that have accumulated in the last thirty years, and have come to form a well-defined field within financial economics known as “market microstructure.” Focusing on liquidity and price discovery, the chapters analyze the tension between the two, pointing out that when price-relevant information reaches the market through trading pressure rather than through a public announcement, liquidity suffers. The book also confronts many puzzling phenomena in securities markets and uses the analytical tools and empirical methods of market microstructure to understand them. These include issues such as why liquidity changes over time, why large trades move prices up or down, and why these price changes are subsequently reversed, why we see concentration of securities trading, why some traders willingly disclose their intended trades while others hide them, and why we observe temporary deviations from arbitrage prices.