An Intraday Analysis of the Probability of Trading on the ASX at the Asking Price

We explain the probability of a trade at the asking price across time. The database contains intraday bid‐ask quotes and transaction prices on the Australian Stock Exchange. We find systematic patterns in the probability of a trade at the asking price, corresponding to previously documented return anomalies, including the day‐of‐week, end‐of‐day and turn‐of‐year anomalies. The probability is higher when a trade is of lower dollar volume, lower buy‐order imbalance, lower bid‐ask spread, when it is a trade of a smaller firm, a trade of a stock with higher trading frequency, higher price level, and the security is approved for short selling.