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preprint2015arXiv

From Walras' auctioneer to continuous time double auctions: A general dynamic theory of supply and demand

In standard Walrasian auctions, the price of a good is defined as the point where the supply and demand curves intersect. Since both curves are generically regular, the response to small perturbations is linearly small. However, a crucial ingredient is absent of the theory, namely transactions themselves. What happens after they occur? To answer the question, we develop a dynamic theory for supply and demand based on agents with heterogeneous beliefs. When the inter-auction time is infinitely long, the Walrasian mechanism is recovered. When transactions are allowed to happen in continuous time, a peculiar property emerges: close to the price, supply and demand vanish quadratically, which we empirically confirm on the Bitcoin. This explains why price impact in financial markets is universally observed to behave as the square root of the excess volume. The consequences are important, as they imply that the very fact of clearing the market makes prices hypersensitive to small fluctuations.

preprint2016arXiv

Should we opt for the Black Friday discounted price or wait until the Boxing Day?

We derive an optimal strategy for minimizing the expected loss in the two-period economy when a pivotal decision needs to be made during the first time period and cannot be subsequently reversed. Our interest in the problem has been motivated by the classical shopper's dilemma during the Black Friday promotion period, and our solution crucially relies on the pioneering work of McDonnell and Abbott on the two-envelope paradox.

preprint2016arXiv

Understanding the Impacts of Dark Pools on Price Discovery

This paper investigates the impact of dark pools on price discovery (the efficiency of prices on stock exchanges to aggregate information). Assets are traded in either an exchange or a dark pool, with the dark pool offering better prices but lower execution rates. Informed traders receive noisy and heterogeneous signals about an asset's fundamental. We find that informed traders use dark pools to mitigate their information risk and there is a sorting effect: in equilibrium, traders with strong signals trade in exchanges, traders with moderate signals trade in dark pools, and traders with weak signals do not trade. As a result, dark pools have an amplification effect on price discovery. That is, when information precision is high (information risk is low), the majority of informed traders trade in the exchange hence adding a dark pool enhances price discovery, whereas when information precision is low (information risk is high), the majority of the informed traders trade in the dark pool hence adding a dark pool impairs price discovery. The paper reconciles the conflicting empirical evidence and produces novel empirical predictions. The paper also provides regulatory suggestions

preprint2016arXiv

Continuous-Time Random Walk with multi-step memory: An application to market dynamics

A novel version of the Continuous-Time Random Walk (CTRW) model with memory is developed. This memory means the dependence between arbitrary number of successive jumps of the process, while waiting times between jumps are considered as i.i.d. random variables. The dependence was found by analysis of empirical histograms for the stochastic process of a single share price on a market within the high frequency time scale, and justified theoretically by considering bid-ask bounce mechanism containing some delay characteristic for any double-auction market. Our model turns out to be exactly analytically solvable, which enables a direct comparison of its predictions with their empirical counterparts, for instance, with empirical velocity autocorrelation function. Thus this paper significantly extends the capabilities of the CTRW formalism.

preprint2016arXiv

A reduced-form model for level-1 limit order books

One popular approach to model the limit order books dynamics of the best bid and ask at level-1 is to use the reduced-form diffusion approximations. It is well known that the biggest contributing factor to the price movement is the imbalance of the best bid and ask. We investigate the data of the level-1 limit order books of a basket of stocks and study the numerical evidence of drift, correlation, volatility and their dependence on the imbalance. Based on the numerical discoveries, we develop a nonparametric discrete model for the dynamics of the best bid and ask, which can be approximated by a reduced-form model with analytical tractability that can fit the empirical data of correlation, volatilities and probability of price movement simultaneously.

preprint2016arXiv

Quantifying immediate price impact of trades based on the $k$-shell decomposition of stock trading networks

Traders in a stock market exchange stock shares and form a stock trading network. Trades at different positions of the stock trading network may contain different information. We construct stock trading networks based on the limit order book data and classify traders into $k$ classes using the $k$-shell decomposition method. We investigate the influences of trading behaviors on the price impact by comparing a closed national market (A-shares) with an international market (B-shares), individuals and institutions, partially filled and filled trades, buyer-initiated and seller-initiated trades, and trades at different positions of a trading network. Institutional traders professionally use some trading strategies to reduce the price impact and individuals at the same positions in the trading network have a higher price impact than institutions. We also find that trades in the core have higher price impacts than those in the peripheral shell.

preprint2016arXiv

Dynamical Models of Stock Prices Based on Technical Trading Rules Part I: The Models

In this paper we use fuzzy systems theory to convert the technical trading rules commonly used by stock practitioners into excess demand functions which are then used to drive the price dynamics. The technical trading rules are recorded in natural languages where fuzzy words and vague expressions abound. In Part I of this paper, we will show the details of how to transform the technical trading heuristics into nonlinear dynamic equations. First, we define fuzzy sets to represent the fuzzy terms in the technical trading rules; second, we translate each technical trading heuristic into a group of fuzzy IF-THEN rules; third, we combine the fuzzy IF-THEN rules in a group into a fuzzy system; and finally, the linear combination of these fuzzy systems is used as the excess demand function in the price dynamic equation. We transform a wide variety of technical trading rules into fuzzy systems, including moving average rules, support and resistance rules, trend line rules, big buyer, big seller and manipulator rules, band and stop rules, and volume and relative strength rules. Simulation results show that the price dynamics driven by these technical trading rules are complex and chaotic, a

preprint2016arXiv

Dynamical Models of Stock Prices Based on Technical Trading Rules Part III: Application to Hong Kong Stocks

In Part III of this study, we apply the price dynamical model with big buyers and big sellers developed in Part I of this paper to the daily closing prices of the top 20 banking and real estate stocks listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The basic idea is to estimate the strength parameters of the big buyers and the big sellers in the model and make buy/sell decisions based on these parameter estimates. We propose two trading strategies: (i) Follow-the-Big-Buyer which buys when big buyer begins to appear and there is no sign of big sellers, holds the stock as long as the big buyer is still there, and sells the stock once the big buyer disappears; and (ii) Ride-the-Mood which buys as soon as the big buyer strength begins to surpass the big seller strength, and sells the stock once the opposite happens. Based on the testing over 245 two-year intervals uniformly distributed across the seven years from 03-July-2007 to 02-July-2014 which includes a variety of scenarios, the net profits would increase 67% or 120% on average if an investor switched from the benchmark Buy-and-Hold strategy to the Follow-the-Big-Buyer or Ride-the-Mood strategies during this period, respectively.

preprint2016arXiv

Dynamical Models of Stock Prices Based on Technical Trading Rules Part II: Analysis of the Models

In Part II of this paper, we concentrate our analysis on the price dynamical model with the moving average rules developed in Part I of this paper. By decomposing the excessive demand function, we reveal that it is the interplay between trend-following and contrarian actions that generates the price chaos, and give parameter ranges for the price series to change from divergence to chaos and to oscillation. We prove that the price dynamical model has an infinite number of equilibrium points but all these equilibrium points are unstable. We demonstrate the short-term predictability of the return volatility and derive the detailed formula of the Lyapunov exponent as function of the model parameters. We show that although the price is chaotic, the volatility converges to some constant very quickly at the rate of the Lyapunov exponent. We extract the formula relating the converged volatility to the model parameters based on Monte-Carlo simulations. We explore the circumstances under which the returns show independency and illustrate in details how the independency index changes with the model parameters. Finally, we plot the strange attractor and return distribution of the chaotic price

preprint2016arXiv

Optimal Trading with Linear and (small) Non-Linear Costs

We reconsider the problem of optimal trading in the presence of linear and quadratic costs, for arbitrary linear costs but in the limit where quadratic costs are small. Using matched asymptotic expansion techniques, we find that the trading speed vanishes inside a band that is narrower than in the absence of quadratic costs, by an amount that scales as the one-third power of quadratic costs. Outside of the band, we find three regimes: a small boundary layer where the velocity vanishes linearly with the distance to the band, an intermediate region where the velocity behaves as a square-root of that distance, and a far region where it becomes linear. Our solution is consistent with available numerical results. We determine the conditions in which our expansion is useful in practical applications, and generalize our solution to other forms of non-linear costs.

preprint2016arXiv

Limit order trading with a mean reverting reference price

Optimal control models for limit order trading often assume that the underlying asset price is a Brownian motion since they deal with relatively short time scales. The resulting optimal bid and ask limit order prices tend to track the underlying price as one might expect. This is indeed the case with the model of Avellaneda and Stoikov (2008), which has been studied extensively. We consider here this model under the condition when the underlying price is mean reverting. Our main result is that when time is far from the terminal, the optimal price for bid and ask limit orders is constant, which means that it does not track the underlying price. Numerical simulations confirm this behavior. When the underlying price is mean reverting, then for times sufficiently far from terminal, it is more advantageous to focus on the mean price and ignore fluctuations around it. Mean reversion suggests that limit orders will be executed with some regularity, and this is why they are optimal. We also explore intermediate time regimes where limit order prices are influenced by the inventory of outstanding orders. The duration of this intermediate regime depends on the liquidity of the market as measu

preprint2016arXiv

Equity Market Impact Modeling: an Empirical Analysis for Chinese Market

Market impact has become a subject of increasing concern among academics and industry experts. We put forward a price impact model which considers the heteroscedasticity of price in the time dimension and dependency between permanent impact and temporary impact. We discuss and derive the extremum of the expectation of permanent impact and realized impact by constructing several special trading trajectories. Given our use of a large trade and quote tick records of 17,213,238,343 compiled from the Chinese stock market, the model assessment ultimately suggest that our model is better than Almgren's model. Interestingly, the result of random effect analysis indicates the parameter $α$, which is the exponent of the impact function, is a constant with a value of around 0.7 across all stocks. Our model and empirical result would give academia some insight of mechanism of Chinese market, and can be applied to algorithm trading.

preprint2016arXiv

Optimal Risk-Averse Timing of an Asset Sale: Trending vs Mean-Reverting Price Dynamics

This paper studies the optimal risk-averse timing to sell a risky asset. The investor's risk preference is described by the exponential, power, or log utility. Two stochastic models are considered for the asset price -- the geometric Brownian motion and exponential Ornstein-Uhlenbeck models -- to account for, respectively, the trending and mean-reverting price dynamics. In all cases, we derive the optimal thresholds and certainty equivalents to sell the asset, and compare them across models and utilities, with emphasis on their dependence on asset price, risk aversion, and quantity. We find that the timing option may render the investor's value function and certainty equivalent non-concave in price. Numerical results are provided to illustrate the investor's strategies and the premium associated with optimally timing to sell.

preprint2016arXiv

Electricity Price Forecasting using Sale and Purchase Curves: The X-Model

Our paper aims to model and forecast the electricity price by taking a completely new perspective on the data. It will be the first approach which is able to combine the insights of market structure models with extensive and modern econometric analysis. Instead of directly modeling the electricity price as it is usually done in time series or data mining approaches, we model and utilize its true source: the sale and purchase curves of the electricity exchange. We will refer to this new model as X-Model, as almost every deregulated electricity price is simply the result of the intersection of the electricity supply and demand curve at a certain auction. Therefore we show an approach to deal with a tremendous amount of auction data, using a subtle data processing technique as well as dimension reduction and lasso based estimation methods. We incorporate not only several known features, such as seasonal behavior or the impact of other processes like renewable energy, but also completely new elaborated stylized facts of the bidding structure. Our model is able to capture the non-linear behavior of the electricity price, which is especially useful for predicting huge price spikes. Using

preprint2016arXiv

Identifying collusion groups using spectral clustering

In an illiquid stock, traders can collude and place orders on a predetermined price and quantity at a fixed schedule. This is usually done to manipulate the price of the stock or to create artificial liquidity in the stock, which may mislead genuine investors. Here, the problem is to identify such group of colluding traders. We modeled the problem instance as a graph, where each trader corresponds to a vertex of the graph and trade corresponds to edges of the graph. Further, we assign weights on edges depending on total volume, total number of trades, maximum change in the price and commonality between two vertices. Spectral clustering algorithms are used on the constructed graph to identify colluding group(s). We have compared our results with simulated data to show the effectiveness of spectral clustering to detecting colluding groups. Moreover, we also have used parameters of real data to test the effectiveness of our algorithm.

preprint2016arXiv

Optimal trading policies for wind energy producer

We study the optimal trading policies for a wind energy producer who aims to sell the future production in the open forward, spot, intraday and adjustment markets, and who has access to imperfect dynamically updated forecasts of the future production. We construct a stochastic model for the forecast evolution and determine the optimal trading policies which are updated dynamically as new forecast information becomes available. Our results allow to quantify the expected future gain of the wind producer and to determine the economic value of the forecasts.

preprint2016arXiv

Quasi-Centralized Limit Order Books

A quasi-centralized limit order book (QCLOB) is a limit order book (LOB) in which financial institutions can only access the trading opportunities offered by counterparties with whom they possess sufficient bilateral credit. We perform an empirical analysis of a recent, high-quality data set from a large electronic trading platform that utilizes QCLOBs to facilitate trade. We find many significant differences between our results and those widely reported for other LOBs. We also uncover a remarkable empirical universality: although the distributions describing order flow and market state vary considerably across days, a simple, linear rescaling causes them to collapse onto a single curve. Motivated by this finding, we propose a semi-parametric model of order flow and market state in a QCLOB on a single trading day. Our model provides similar performance to that of parametric curve-fitting techniques, while being simpler to compute and faster to implement.

preprint2016arXiv

Taylor's Law of temporal fluctuation scaling in stock illiquidity

Taylor's law of temporal fluctuation scaling, variance $\sim$ $a($mean$)^b$, is ubiquitous in natural and social sciences. We report for the first time convincing evidence of a solid temporal fluctuation scaling law in stock illiquidity by investigating the mean-variance relationship of the high-frequency illiquidity of almost all stocks traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SHSE) and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) during the period from 1999 to 2011. Taylor's law holds for A-share markets (SZSE Main Board, SZSE Small & Mediate Enterprise Board, SZSE Second Board, and SHSE Main Board) and B-share markets (SZSE B-share and SHSE B-share). We find that the scaling exponent $b$ is greater than 2 for the A-share markets and less than 2 for the B-share markets. We further unveil that Taylor's law holds for stocks in 17 industry categories, in 28 industrial sectors and in 31 provinces and direct-controlled municipalities with the majority of scaling exponents $b\in(2,3)$. We also investigate the $Δ{t}$-min illiquidity and find that the scaling exponent $b(Δ{t})$ increases logarithmically for small $Δ{t}$ values and decreases fast to a stable level.

preprint2016arXiv

Trading against disorderly liquidation of a large position under asymmetric information and market impact

We consider trading against a hedge fund or large trader that must liquidate a large position in a risky asset if the market price of the asset crosses a certain threshold. Liquidation occurs in a disorderly manner and negatively impacts the market price of the asset. We consider the perspective of small investors whose trades do not induce market impact and who possess different levels of information about the liquidation trigger mechanism and the market impact. We classify these market participants into three types: fully informed, partially informed and uninformed investors. We consider the portfolio optimization problems and compare the optimal trading and wealth processes for the three classes of investors theoretically and by numerical illustrations.

preprint2016arXiv

Unravelling the trading invariance hypothesis

We confirm and substantially extend the recent empirical result of Andersen et al. \cite{Andersen2015}, where it is shown that the amount of risk $W$ exchanged in the E-mini S\&P futures market (i.e. price times volume times volatility) scales like the 3/2 power of the number of trades $N$. We show that this 3/2-law holds very precisely across 12 futures contracts and 300 single US stocks, and across a wide range of time scales. However, we find that the "trading invariant" $I=W/N^{3/2}$ proposed by Kyle and Obizhaeva is in fact quite different for different contracts, in particular between futures and single stocks. Our analysis suggests $I/{\cal C}$ as a more natural candidate, where $\cal C$ is the average spread cost of a trade, defined as the average of the trade size times the bid-ask spread. We also establish two more complex scaling laws for the volatility $σ$ and the traded volume $V$ as a function of $N$, that reveal the existence of a characteristic number of trades $N_0$ above which the expected behaviour $σ\sim \sqrt{N}$ and $V \sim N$ hold, but below which strong deviations appear, induced by the size of the~tick.

preprint2016arXiv

Micro-foundation using percolation theory of the finite-time singular behavior of the crash hazard rate in a class of rational expectation bubbles

We present a plausible micro-founded model for the previously postulated power law finite time singular form of the crash hazard rate in the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette model of rational expectation bubbles. The model is based on a percolation picture of the network of traders and the concept that clusters of connected traders share the same opinion. The key ingredient is the notion that a shift of position from buyer to seller of a sufficiently large group of traders can trigger a crash. This provides a formula to estimate the crash hazard rate by summation over percolation clusters above a minimum size of a power sa (with a > 1) of the cluster sizes s, similarly to a generalized percolation susceptibility. The power sa of cluster sizes emerges from the super-linear dependence of group activity as a function of group size, previously documented in the literature. The crash hazard rate exhibits explosive finite-time singular behaviors when the control parameter (fraction of occupied sites, or density of traders in the network) approaches the percolation threshold pc. Realistic dynamics are generated by modelling the density of traders on the percolation network by an Ornstein-Uhlenbec

preprint2016arXiv

Average cross-responses in correlated financial market

There are non-vanishing price responses across different stocks in correlated financial markets. We further study this issue by performing different averages, which identify active and passive cross-responses. The two average cross-responses show different characteristic dependences on the time lag. The passive cross-response exhibits a shorter response period with sizeable volatilities, while the corresponding period for the active cross-response is longer. The average cross-responses for a given stock are evaluated either with respect to the whole market or to different sectors. Using the response strength, the influences of individual stocks are identified and discussed. Moreover, the various cross-responses as well as the average cross-responses are compared with the self-responses. In contrast, the short memory of trade sign cross-correlation for stock pairs, the sign cross-correlation has long memory when averaged over different pairs of stocks.

preprint2016arXiv

Static vs adapted optimal execution strategies in two benchmark trading models

We consider the optimal solutions to the trade execution problem in the two different classes of i) fully adapted or adaptive and ii) deterministic or static strategies, comparing them. We do this in two different benchmark models. The first model is a discrete time framework with an information flow process, dealing with both permanent and temporary impact, minimizing the expected cost of the trade. The second model is a continuous time framework where the objective function is the sum of the expected cost and a value at risk (or expected shortfall) type risk criterion. Optimal adapted solutions are known in both frameworks from the original works of Bertsimas and Lo (1998) and Gatheral and Schied (2011). In this paper we derive the optimal static strategies for both benchmark models and we study quantitatively the improvement in optimality when moving from static strategies to fully adapted ones. We conclude that, in the benchmark models we study, the difference is not relevant, except for extreme unrealistic cases for the model or impact parameters. This indirectly confirms that in the similar framework of Almgren and Chriss (2000) one is fine deriving a static optimal solution,

preprint2016arXiv

Price impact without order book: A study of the OTC credit index market

We present a study of price impact in the over-the-counter credit index market, where no limit order book is used. Contracts are traded via dealers, that compete for the orders of clients. Despite this distinct microstructure, we successfully apply the propagator technique to estimate the price impact of individual transactions. Because orders are typically split less than in multilateral markets, impact is observed to be mainly permanent, in line with theoretical expectations. A simple method is presented to correct for errors in our classification of trades between buying and selling. We find a very significant, temporary increase in order flow correlations during late 2015 and early 2016, which we attribute to increased order splitting or herding among investors. We also find indications that orders advertised to less dealers may have lower price impact. Quantitative results are compatible with earlier findings in other more classical markets, further supporting the argument that price impact is a universal phenomenon, to a large degree independent of market microstructure.

464 works