High-Frequency Trading in Australia

This thesis provides three projects regarding high-frequency traders (HFTs) in order to determine how they participate on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and how their participation impacts the quality of the market and other traders. To this end, their order-submission strategies and contributions toward market quality were examined. This thesis finds that HFTs do not appear to exhibit trading biases, help provide market liquidity and also contribute new information into stock prices (though the introduction of the colocation service did not significantly affect this), and that their presence during the opening batch auction improves liquidity and information flow.