Breaking news

Abstract

This paper examines how regulatory interventions in high-frequency financial markets affect price discovery. We focus on Breaking news, where dynamic circuit breakers trigger trading halts immediately after the release of macroeconomic fundamentals. Within a high-frequency signal-in-noise model, we show that triggering rules complicate statistical inference for the price impact of news, rendering conventional non-parametric jump estimators inconsistent. Building on this insight, we develop a regression-based test for fundamental pricing that accounts for non-vanishing transition times. The test compares transition price changes to efficient jumps implied by observable factors. Our empirical analysis of CME E-mini S\&P 500 futures shows that Breaking news are associated with systematic deviations from fundamental pricing, predominantly in the form of overshooting. Our findings highlight a regulatory trade-off: the appeal of simple and transparent circuit breaker rules must be weighed against their cost of preventing fundamentals from being priced contemporaneously, thereby creating adverse incentives and introducing distortions.