Market microstructure studies how prices actually form: the dynamics of limit order books, the economics of market making, price impact of large orders, and the information content of order flow. It is the layer where trading strategy meets market plumbing, and it matters to anyone whose backtest assumes fills at mid-price.
Two branches dominate this collection. The theoretical branch models order books with queueing theory and stochastic control — mathematically rich, but check whether the model’s assumptions (Poisson arrivals, constant spreads) survive contact with data. The empirical branch measures impact curves, adverse selection, and liquidity patterns from tick data; its perennial weakness is dataset access, so pay attention to which venue and period a result comes from before assuming it generalizes.
Related hubs: High-Frequency Trading & Execution, Statistical Arbitrage, Crypto Markets & DeFi.
Explainers from the corpus: VWAP prediction: methods and benchmarks →
In this paper, we simulate the execution of a large stock order with real data and general power law in the Almgren and Chriss model. The example that we consider is the liquidation of a large position executed over the course of a single trading day in a limit order book. Transaction costs are incu
A market maker provides liquidity by quoting prices to buy and sell an asset, earning the spread while managing inventory risk. We study market makers trained with multi-agent reinforcement learning on prediction markets, specifically Polymarket, whose thin order books pose distinct challenges. Thre
We study whether model diversity survives selection into trading. In synthetic markets with a fixed mixture of three language-model families, news presentation changes their representation among submitted orders. At the announcement round, Qwen’s share of submitted orders shifts by 48 percentage poi
We study exact and near exact extraction of caplet volatilities from market cap quotes and identify why some common choices produce extreme oscillations or negative vols. Interpolation scheme and node placement are shown to be the primary drivers of instability, which can be amplified by isolated ba
We study short-horizon forecasting in financial time series under strict causal constraints, treating the market as a non-stationary stochastic system in which any predictive observable must be computable online from information available up to the decision time. Rather than proposing a machine-lear
We demonstrate that the choice of normalization for order flow intensity is fundamental to signal extraction in finance, not merely a technical detail. Through theoretical modeling, Monte Carlo simulation, and empirical validation using Korean market data, we prove that market capitalization normali
In decentralized finance (DeFi), designing fixed-income lending automated market makers (AMMs) is extremely challenging due to time-related complexities. Moreover, existing protocols only support single-maturity lending. Building upon the BondMM protocol, this paper argues that its mathematical inva
Decentralized Exchanges (DEXs) are now a significant component of the financial world where billions of dollars are traded daily. Differently from traditional markets, which are typically based on Limit Order Books, DEXs typically work as Automated Market Makers, and, since the implementation of Uni
Multifractality in time series analysis characterizes the presence of multiple scaling exponents, indicating heterogeneous temporal structures and complex dynamical behaviors beyond simple monofractal models. In the context of digital currency markets, multifractal properties arise due to the interp
This study measures the long memory of investor-segregated cash flows within the Korean equity market from 2015 to 2024. Applying detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to BUY, SELL, and NET aggregates, we estimate the Hurst exponent ($H$) using both a static specification and a 250-day rolling window
The increasing penetration of variable renewable energy and flexible demand technologies, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps, introduces significant uncertainty in power systems, resulting in greater imbalance; defined as the deviation between scheduled and actual supply or demand. Short-term
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 alway
Market making is a popular trading strategy, which aims to generate profit from the spread between the quotes posted at either side of the market. It has been shown that training market makers (MMs) with adversarial reinforcement learning allows to overcome the risks due to changing market condition
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 imb
We conduct modeling of the price dynamics following order flow imbalance in market microstructure and apply the model to the analysis of Chinese CSI 300 Index Futures. There are three findings. The first is that the order flow imbalance is analogous to a shock to the market. Unlike the common practi
We introduce a new framework for optimal routing and arbitrage in AMM driven markets. This framework improves on the original best-practice convex optimization by restricting the search to the boundary of the optimal space. We can parameterize this boundary using a set of prices, and a potentially v
Decentralized perpetuals protocols have collectively reached billions of dollars of daily trading volume, yet are still not serious competitors on the basis of trading volume with centralized venues such as Binance. One of the main reasons for this is the high cost of capital for market makers and s
I introduce an agent-based model of a Perpetual Futures market with heterogeneous agents trading via a central limit order book. Perpetual Futures (henceforth Perps) are financial derivatives introduced by the economist Robert Shiller, designed to peg their price to that of the underlying Spot marke
Bertsimas and Lo’s seminal work established a foundational framework for addressing the implementation shortfall dilemma faced by large institutional investors. Their models emphasized the critical role of accurate knowledge of market microstructure and price/information dynamics in optimizing trade
Universal power laws have been scrutinised in physics and beyond, and a long-standing debate exists in econophysics regarding the strict universality of the nonlinear price impact, commonly referred to as the square-root law (SRL). The SRL posits that the average price impact $I$ follows a power law
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