Identifying informed traders in futures markets

We use daily positions of futures market participants to identify informed traders. These data contain 8,921 unique traders. We identify between 94 and 230 traders as overnight informed and 91 as intraday informed with little overlap. Floor brokers/traders are over-represented in the overnight informed group. The intraday informed group is dominated by managed money traders/hedge funds and swap dealers, with commercial hedgers under-represented. We find that characteristics such as experience, position size, trading activity, and type of positions held offer significant predictive power for who is informed. An analysis of daily trader profits confirms that we select highly profitable traders. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.