In August 2012, the New York Stock Exchange launched the Retail Liquidity Program (RLP), a trading facility that enables participating organizations to quote dark limit orders executable only by retail traders. A Hasbrouck (1991) structural vector autoregression shows that the facility increased the information content of the order flow by distinguishing retail trades from relatively more informed trades. A differences-in-differences event study finds that the RLP launch impacted market quality. Stocks with substantial RLP activity experienced mildly improved relative bid-ask spreads, effective spreads, price impacts and return autocorrelations in both the RLP and non-RLP segments.

Follow-up article available: http://jot.iijournals.com/content/13/3/13