Trading around macroeconomic announcements: Are all traders created equal?

This paper examines the effects of macroeconomic announcements on equity index markets using high frequency transactions data for the regular and E-mini S&P 500 index futures contracts. For ten types of announcements that significantly affect prices, we analyze the price adjustment process and the trading patterns of exchange locals and off-exchange customers around the announcements. We find a large increase in trading activity immediately after the announcement. The results also show that during this initial surge in trading activity, locals are able to time their trades better than off-exchange traders even when locals do not have the advantage of access to the order flow. The trading strategy followed by exchange locals in the first 20 seconds after the announcement tends to be profitable, while off-exchange traders tend to make losing trades over the same time period. These results lend evidence that local traders tend to react to the macroeconomic information faster than off-exchange traders.