Understanding the worst-kept secret of high-frequency trading

Sergio Pulido (), Mathieu Rosenbaum () and Emmanouil Sfendourakis ()
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Sergio Pulido: ENSIIE - Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique pour l'Industrie et l'Entreprise, LaMME - Laboratoire de Mathématiques et Modélisation d'Evry - ENSIIE - Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique pour l'Industrie et l'Entreprise - UEVE - Université d'Évry-Val-d'Essonne - Université Paris-Saclay - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Mathieu Rosenbaum: CMAP - Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées de l'Ecole polytechnique - Inria - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Emmanouil Sfendourakis: CMAP - Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées de l'Ecole polytechnique - Inria - Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique - X - École polytechnique - IP Paris - Institut Polytechnique de Paris - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: Volume imbalance in a limit order book is often considered as a reliable indicator for predicting future price moves. In this work, we seek to analyse the nuances of the relationship between prices and volume imbalance. To this end, we study a market-making problem which allows us to view the imbalance as an optimal response to price moves. In our model, there is an underlying efficient price driving the mid-price, which follows the model with uncertainty zones. A single market maker knows the underlying efficient price and consequently the probability of a mid-price jump in the future. She controls the volumes she quotes at the best bid and ask prices. Solving her optimization problem allows us to understand endogenously the price-imbalance connection and to confirm in particular that it is optimal to quote a predictive imbalance. Our model can also be used by a platform to select a suitable tick size, which is known to be a crucial topic in financial regulation. The value function of the market maker's control problem can be viewed as a family of functions, indexed by the level of the market maker's inventory, solving a coupled system of PDEs. We show existence and uniqueness of classical solutions to this coupled system of equations. In the case of a continuous inventory, we also prove uniqueness of the market maker's optimal control policy.

Keywords: market microstructure; volume imbalance; high-frequency market-making; optimal tick size; stochastic optimal control; Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation; classical solutions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-07-24
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04362236v2
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