I use Nasdaq Retail Trading Activity Tracker (RTAT) data to study the comovement of retail trading between stocks and how the retail trading correlated stock peers predict returns and microstructure metrics in the US equity markets. In the recent Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), I find that retail trading of IBIT correlates with economically meaningful peers which predicts IBIT's market dynamics. I extend my analyses to the US common equity sample, and find that higher average return of retail trading peers consistently leads to higher return, volatility, liquidity, volume, information efficiency of the focal stock. The result holds for the variations within firms and in the cross-section of firms, represented by fixed effects panel regressions and fama-macbeth regressions respectively. The result holds after controlling for price, fundamentals, sentiment, short interest, and risk variables. Further, I find that extending the peer selection space from common stocks to the entire CRSP investment universe increases the predictive power of peers' return for common stocks' market dynamics, demonstrating that conventionally omitted sample contains valuable information for forecasting asset returns and microstructure.

Perpetual Futures Contracts and Cryptocurrency Market Quality - We examine perpetual futures contracts' impact on cryptocurrency spot market quality. Using high-frequency order book data from 2017 to 2023, we document that spot market quality follows a U-shaped pattern over perpetual contracts' eight-hour funding cycles. Exploiting both the exogenous termination of perpetual trading at Huobi Exchange and 95 staggered contract introductions, we identify a seemingly puzzling liquidity pattern: perpetual contracts increase spot trading volume while widening quoted spreads. To resolve this puzzle, we demonstrate that this pattern reflects increased informed trading, particularly during funding settlement hours and periods of larger funding fee magnitudes. Market makers respond to heightened adverse selection risk by widening quoted spreads.

Inflation Expectation and Cryptocurrency Investment - Using proprietary data from the predominant cryptocurrency exchange in India together with the country's Household Inflation Expectations Survey, we document a significantly positive association between inflation expectations and individual cryptocurrency purchases. Higher inflation expectations are also associated with more new investors in cryptocurrencies. We investigate investment heterogeneity in multiple dimensions, and find the effect to be concentrated in Bitcoin (BTC) and Tether (USDT) trading. The results are robust after controlling for speculative demand captured by surveys of investors' expected cryptocurrency returns, and admit causal interpretations as confirmed using multiple instrumental variables. Our findings provide direct evidence that households already adopt cryptocurrencies for inflation hedging, which in turn rationalizes their high adoption in developing countries without a globally dominant currency.