Snowbirds in Securities Trading: Canadian Brokers' U.S.-Bound Order Routing

We study a unique data set of all client trades that the six largest Canadian dealers sent to U.S. equity markets in 2014-2015. Contrary to the public perception, Canadian dealers use U.S. markets only lightly and send less than 5% of their $-volume to the U.S.; on 60% of security-day observations, they send no order flow to the U.S. Usage of U.S. markets differs significantly among the dealers: one uses almost exclusively exchanges, but most …