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 →
Accurate short-term price forecasting is essential for daily operations in electricity markets. This article introduces a new method, called Smoothing Quantile Regression (SQR) Averaging, that improves upon well-performing probabilistic forecasting schemes. To demonstrate its utility, a comprehensiv
Robust yield curve estimation is crucial in fixed-income markets for accurate instrument pricing, effective risk management, and informed trading strategies. Traditional approaches, including the bootstrapping method and parametric Nelson-Siegel models, often struggle with overfitting or instability
As decentralized finance (DeFi) evolves, distinguishing between user behaviors - liquidity provision versus active trading - has become vital for risk modeling and on-chain reputation. We propose a behavioral scoring framework for Uniswap that assigns two complementary scores: a Liquidity Provision
In the complex landscape of traditional futures trading, where vast data and variables like real-time Limit Order Books (LOB) complicate price predictions, we introduce the FutureQuant Transformer model, leveraging attention mechanisms to navigate these challenges. Unlike conventional models focused
Decentralized exchanges (DEXs) face persistent challenges in liquidity retention and user engagement due to inefficiencies in conventional automated market maker (AMM) designs. This work proposes a dual-mechanism framework to address these limitations: a ``Better Market Maker (BMM)’’, which is a liq
Decentralized finance (DeFi) has revolutionized the financial landscape, with protocols like Uniswap offering innovative automated market-making mechanisms. This article explores the development of a backtesting framework specifically tailored for concentrated liquidity market makers (CLMM). The foc
We consider a liquidity provider’s (LP’s) exposure to stablecoin and liquid staking derivative (LSD) depegs on Curve’s StableSwap pools. We construct a suite of metrics designed to detect potential asset depegs based on price and trading data. Using our metrics, we fine-tune a Bayesian Online Change
High-frequency trading requires fast data processing without information lags for precise stock price forecasting. This high-paced stock price forecasting is usually based on vectors that need to be treated as sequential and time-independent signals due to the time irregularities that are inherent i
The study of order volumes in financial markets has shown that these display several non-trivial statistical properties. Most studies have been focused on the bulk properties of volume of incoming orders or of realized transactions rather than the dynamical aspects. The present work is a study of th
We investigate the theoretical and empirical relationships between activity in on-chain markets and pricing in off-chain cryptocurrency markets (e.g., ETH/USD prices). The motivation is to develop methods for proxying off-chain market data using data and computation that is in principle verifiable o
Given the promising results on joint modeling of SPX/VIX smiles of the recently introduced quadratic rough Heston model, we consider a multi-asset market making problem on SPX and its derivatives, e.g. VIX futures, SPX and VIX options. The market maker tries to maximize its profit from spread captur
We develop a new order-level proxy for high-frequency trading (HFT) activity based on precise order placement and study its effects on market quality. With quotes updating multiple times per second, millisecond-level order-book access makes high-frequency traders more likely to submit active exact-m
This study uses a high-frequency dataset from a stock exchange to examine how forecasting ability and liquidity provision relate to institutional traders’ proprietary intraday profitability. We discover persistent forecasting abilities among traders. Specifically, we demonstrate that hypothetical fl
As the FX markets continue to evolve, many institutions have started offering passive access to their internal liquidity pools. Market makers act as principal and have the opportunity to fill those orders as part of their risk management, or they may choose to adjust pricing to their external OTC fr
To trade tokens in cryptoeconomic systems, automated market makers (AMMs) typically rely on liquidity providers (LPs) that deposit tokens in exchange for rewards. To profit from such rewards, LPs must use effective liquidity provisioning strategies. However, LPs lack guidance for developing such str
This study explores the prediction of high-frequency price changes using deep learning models. Although state-of-the-art methods perform well, their complexity impedes the understanding of successful predictions. We found that an inadequately defined target price process may render predictions meani
In this paper, we analyze traders’ behavior within both centralized exchanges (CEXs) and decentralized exchanges (DEXs), focusing on the volatility of Bitcoin prices and the trading activity of investors engaged in perpetual future contracts. We categorize the architecture of perpetual future exchan
The published MLP-based DRL in finance has difficulties in learning the dynamics of the environment when the action scale increases. If the buying and selling increase to one thousand shares, the MLP agent will not be able to effectively adapt to the environment. To address this, we designed a CNN a
The goal of this paper is to disentangle the roles of volume and of participation rate in the price response of the market to a sequence of transactions. To do so, we are inspired the methodology introduced in arXiv:1402.1288, arXiv:1805.07134 where price dynamics are derived from order flow dynamic
Liquidity providers are currently incentivised to provide liquidity through the LP Incentives Programme on dYdX. Based on the various parameters - makerVolume, depths and spreads, they are rewarded accordingly based on their activities. Given the maturity of the BTC and ETH markets, alongside other
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