Limit Order Book and Short-term Stock Price Movement Predictability: Evidence from Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

Objective: Open limit order book can be used as a tool to enhance transparency and price discovery in financial markets by showing the offered volumes and prices of buy and sell orders. In this study, we aim to answer two questions by examining the limit order book on Tehran Stock Exchange: 1) Does the information in the limit order book have the predictive power for stock price movements in the short-term?; 2) Can increasing the public disclosure of the limit order book from three to five levels enhance price discovery? Method: For this purpose, three different regressions areused, each of which measures the volume and price information of the two sides of supply and demand in a different way and examines the ability to predict short-term behavior of stock price by this information. Results: The results show that the limit order book contains information about future short-term returns. Our results also indicate that increasing the public disclosure of the limit order book from three to five levels can enhance transparency and price discovery but it causes the marginal predictive power of additional levels to decrease.

Keywords

• short-term return predictability
• limit-order book
• pre-trade transparency
• price discovery
• information content