High-Frequency Trading

Ultrafast Extreme Events: Empirical Analysis of Mechanisms and Recovery in a Historical Perspective ArXiv ID: 2509.10376 “View on arXiv” Authors: Luca Henrichs, Anton J. Heckens, Thomas Guhr Abstract To understand the emergence of Ultrafast Extreme Events (UEEs), the influence of algorithmic trading or high-frequency traders is of major interest as they make it extremely difficult to intervene and to stabilize financial markets. In an empirical analysis, we compare various characteristics of UEEs over different years for the US stock market to assess the possible non-stationarity of the effects. We show that liquidity plays a dominant role in the emergence of UEEs and find a general pattern in their dynamics. We also empirically investigate the after-effects in view of the recovery rate. We find common patterns for different years. We explain changes in the recovery rate by varying market sentiments for the different years. ...

ARL-Based Multi-Action Market Making with Hawkes Processes and Variable Volatility ArXiv ID: 2508.16589 “View on arXiv” Authors: Ziyi Wang, Carmine Ventre, Maria Polukarov Abstract We advance market-making strategies by integrating Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (ARL), Hawkes Processes, and variable volatility levels while also expanding the action space available to market makers (MMs). To enhance the adaptability and robustness of these strategies – which can quote always, quote only on one side of the market or not quote at all – we shift from the commonly used Poisson process to the Hawkes process, which better captures real market dynamics and self-exciting behaviors. We then train and evaluate strategies under volatility levels of 2 and 200. Our findings show that the 4-action MM trained in a low-volatility environment effectively adapts to high-volatility conditions, maintaining stable performance and providing two-sided quotes at least 92% of the time. This indicates that incorporating flexible quoting mechanisms and realistic market simulations significantly enhances the effectiveness of market-making strategies. ...

ByteGen: A Tokenizer-Free Generative Model for Orderbook Events in Byte Space ArXiv ID: 2508.02247 “View on arXiv” Authors: Yang Li, Zhi Chen Abstract Generative modeling of high-frequency limit order book (LOB) dynamics is a critical yet unsolved challenge in quantitative finance, essential for robust market simulation and strategy backtesting. Existing approaches are often constrained by simplifying stochastic assumptions or, in the case of modern deep learning models like Transformers, rely on tokenization schemes that affect the high-precision, numerical nature of financial data through discretization and binning. To address these limitations, we introduce ByteGen, a novel generative model that operates directly on the raw byte streams of LOB events. Our approach treats the problem as an autoregressive next-byte prediction task, for which we design a compact and efficient 32-byte packed binary format to represent market messages without information loss. The core novelty of our work is the complete elimination of feature engineering and tokenization, enabling the model to learn market dynamics from its most fundamental representation. We achieve this by adapting the H-Net architecture, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer model that uses a dynamic chunking mechanism to discover the inherent structure of market messages without predefined rules. Our primary contributions are: 1) the first end-to-end, byte-level framework for LOB modeling; 2) an efficient packed data representation; and 3) a comprehensive evaluation on high-frequency data. Trained on over 34 million events from CME Bitcoin futures, ByteGen successfully reproduces key stylized facts of financial markets, generating realistic price distributions, heavy-tailed returns, and bursty event timing. Our findings demonstrate that learning directly from byte space is a promising and highly flexible paradigm for modeling complex financial systems, achieving competitive performance on standard market quality metrics without the biases of tokenization. ...

Neural Network-Based Algorithmic Trading Systems: Multi-Timeframe Analysis and High-Frequency Execution in Cryptocurrency Markets ArXiv ID: 2508.02356 “View on arXiv” Authors: Wěi Zhāng Abstract This paper explores neural network-based approaches for algorithmic trading in cryptocurrency markets. Our approach combines multi-timeframe trend analysis with high-frequency direction prediction networks, achieving positive risk-adjusted returns through statistical modeling and systematic market exploitation. The system integrates diverse data sources including market data, on-chain metrics, and orderbook dynamics, translating these into unified buy/sell pressure signals. We demonstrate how machine learning models can effectively capture cross-timeframe relationships, enabling sub-second trading decisions with statistical confidence. ...

Order-Flow Filtration and Directional Association with Short-Horizon Returns ArXiv ID: 2507.22712 “View on arXiv” Authors: Aditya Nittur Anantha, Shashi Jain, Prithwish Maiti Abstract Electronic markets generate dense order flow with many transient orders, which degrade directional signals derived from the limit order book (LOB). We study whether simple structural filters on order lifetime, modification count, and modification timing sharpen the association between order book imbalance (OBI) and short-horizon returns in BankNifty index futures, where unfiltered OBI is already known to be a strong short-horizon directional indicator. The efficacy of each filter is evaluated using a three-step diagnostic ladder: contemporaneous correlations, linear association between discretised regimes, and Hawkes event-time excitation between OBI and return regimes. Our results indicate that filtration of the aggregate order flow produces only modest changes relative to the unfiltered benchmark. By contrast, when filters are applied on the parent orders of executed trades, the resulting OBI series exhibits systematically stronger directional association. Motivated by recent regulatory initiatives to curb noisy order flow, we treat the association between OBI and short-horizon returns as a policy-relevant diagnostic of market quality. We then compare unfiltered and filtered OBI series, using tick-by-tick data from the National Stock Exchange of India, to infer how structural filters on the order flow affect OBI-return dynamics in an emerging market setting. ...

From Data Acquisition to Lag Modeling: Quantitative Exploration of A-Share Market with Low-Coupling System Design ArXiv ID: 2506.19255 “View on arXiv” Authors: Jianyong Fang, Sitong Wu, Junfan Tong Abstract We propose a novel two-stage framework to detect lead-lag relationships in the Chinese A-share market. First, long-term coupling between stocks is measured via daily data using correlation, dynamic time warping, and rank-based metrics. Then, high-frequency data (1-, 5-, and 15-minute) is used to detect statistically significant lead-lag patterns via cross-correlation, Granger causality, and regression models. Our low-coupling modular system supports scalable data processing and improves reproducibility. Results show that strongly coupled stock pairs often exhibit lead-lag effects, especially at finer time scales. These findings provide insights into market microstructure and quantitative trading opportunities. ...

TIP-Search: Time-Predictable Inference Scheduling for Market Prediction under Uncertain Load ArXiv ID: 2506.08026 “View on arXiv” Authors: Xibai Wang Abstract This paper proposes TIP-Search, a time-predictable inference scheduling framework for real-time market prediction under uncertain workloads. Motivated by the strict latency demands in high-frequency financial systems, TIP-Search dynamically selects a deep learning model from a heterogeneous pool, aiming to maximize predictive accuracy while satisfying per-task deadline constraints. Our approach profiles latency and generalization performance offline, then performs online task-aware selection without relying on explicit input domain labels. We evaluate TIP-Search on three real-world limit order book datasets (FI-2010, Binance BTC/USDT, LOBSTER AAPL) and demonstrate that it outperforms static baselines with up to 8.5% improvement in accuracy and 100% deadline satisfaction. Our results highlight the effectiveness of TIP-Search in robust low-latency financial inference under uncertainty. ...

Shortermism and excessive risk taking in optimal execution with a target performance ArXiv ID: 2505.15611 “View on arXiv” Authors: Emilio Barucci, Yuheng Lan Abstract We deal with the optimal execution problem when the broker’s goal is to reach a performance barrier avoiding a downside barrier. The performance is provided by the wealth accumulated by trading in the market, the shares detained by the broker evaluated at the market price plus a slippage cost yielding a quadratic inventory cost. Over a short horizon, this type of remuneration leads, at the same time, to a more aggressive and less risky strategy compared to the classical one, and over a long horizon the performance turns to be poorer and more dispersed. ...

An Efficient deep learning model to Predict Stock Price Movement Based on Limit Order Book ArXiv ID: 2505.22678 “View on arXiv” Authors: Jiahao Yang, Ran Fang, Ming Zhang, Jun Zhou Abstract In high-frequency trading (HFT), leveraging limit order books (LOB) to model stock price movements is crucial for achieving profitable outcomes. However, this task is challenging due to the high-dimensional and volatile nature of the original data. Even recent deep learning models often struggle to capture price movement patterns effectively, particularly without well-designed features. We observed that raw LOB data exhibits inherent symmetry between the ask and bid sides, and the bid-ask differences demonstrate greater stability and lower complexity compared to the original data. Building on this insight, we propose a novel approach in which leverages the Siamese architecture to enhance the performance of existing deep learning models. The core idea involves processing the ask and bid sides separately using the same module with shared parameters. We applied our Siamese-based methods to several widely used strong baselines and validated their effectiveness using data from 14 military industry stocks in the Chinese A-share market. Furthermore, we integrated multi-head attention (MHA) mechanisms with the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module to investigate its role in modeling stock price movements. Our experiments used raw data and widely used Order Flow Imbalance (OFI) features as input with some strong baseline models. The results show that our method improves the performance of strong baselines in over 75$% of cases, excluding the Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) baseline, which performed poorly and is not considered practical. Furthermore, we found that Multi-Head Attention can enhance model performance, particularly over shorter forecasting horizons. ...

Deep Learning Models Meet Financial Data Modalities ArXiv ID: 2504.13521 “View on arXiv” Authors: Unknown Abstract Algorithmic trading relies on extracting meaningful signals from diverse financial data sources, including candlestick charts, order statistics on put and canceled orders, traded volume data, limit order books, and news flow. While deep learning has demonstrated remarkable success in processing unstructured data and has significantly advanced natural language processing, its application to structured financial data remains an ongoing challenge. This study investigates the integration of deep learning models with financial data modalities, aiming to enhance predictive performance in trading strategies and portfolio optimization. We present a novel approach to incorporating limit order book analysis into algorithmic trading by developing embedding techniques and treating sequential limit order book snapshots as distinct input channels in an image-based representation. Our methodology for processing limit order book data achieves state-of-the-art performance in high-frequency trading algorithms, underscoring the effectiveness of deep learning in financial applications. ...