and Esen Onur is an Economist at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The research presented in this paper was co-authored by Eleni Gousgounis, a CFTC limited term-consultant, and Esen Onur, who is a CFTC employee, in their official capacities with the CFTC. The Office of the Chief Economist and CFTC economists produce original research on a broad range of topics relevant to the CFTC's mandate to regulate commodity future markets, commodity options markets, and the expanded mandate to regulate the swaps markets pursuant to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. These papers are often presented at conferences and many of these papers are later published by peer-review and other scholarly outlets. The analyses and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of other members of the Office of Chief Economist, other Commission staff, or the Commission itself. All errors and omissions, if any, are the authors' own responsibility. The Effect of Pit Closure on Futures Trading Motivated by CME's decision to close down most of the futures pits in July of 2015, we analyze the changes in a number of important CME futures markets between 2012 and 2016. We find that although futures pit trading has been diminished to very low levels, it has not completely disappeared. While we do not have evidence of futures pit traders transitioning to the electronic market, we see that some futures pit traders are still active in options pit markets. When we explore the changes in daily trading patterns, we observe a shift in the timing of trading hours for a few select markets. In terms of execution costs, we do not observe any definitive effect of the pit closures on execution costs for most commodities in the electronic market. However, effective spreads for random length lumber futures appear to increase around the time of the announcement of the pit closures. A similar effect is observed for trading strategies in treasury futures during the roll periods.

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This paper posits asymmetric information as the missing link between the currency demands of investors and changes in the exchange rate. A theoretical model demonstrates that changes in the exchange rate and currency demand are positively correlated for well-informed investors and negatively correlated for less well-informed investors, results consistent with stylized facts from the empirical literature. These theoretical findings are supported empirically using a new data set from the Israeli foreign exchange market. The empirical analysis indicates that a one million dollar larger purchase than sales by well-informed financial investors induces an increase of 0.060 per cent in the Israeli Sheqel|Dollar exchange rate over a one month period. A similar net flow from less well-informed investors results in a 0.046 per cent decrease in the exchange rate. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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We decompose the VIX futures term structure into systematic components driving the VIX and idiosyncratic components reflecting demand by various types of futures end‐users. We model two distinct channels by which trading activity manifests itself into futures prices: a contemporaneous “level effect” across the term structure due to the aggregate size of nondealer net demand and a mean‐reverting “roll effect” due to large trades in specific contracts. The observed futures term structure was, on average, higher and steeper than it would have been in the absence of the observed nondealer demand, but the impact varies in sign and magnitude over time.