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 →
Market integrity monitoring is difficult because suspicious price/volume behavior can arise from many benign mechanisms, while modern detection systems often rely on opaque models that are hard to audit and communicate. We present AIMM-X, an explainable monitoring pipeline that combines market micro
In this paper, we study an investor’s optimal entry and exit decisions in a liquid staking protocol (LSP) and an automated market maker (AMM), primarily from the standpoint of the investor. Our analysis focuses on two key investor actions: the initial allocation decision at time $t=0$, and the optim
Stablecoins represent a critical bridge between cryptocurrency and traditional finance, with Tether (USDT) dominating the sector as the largest stablecoin by market capitalization. By Q1 2025, Tether directly held approximately $98.5 billion in U.S. Treasury bills, representing 1.6% of all outstandi
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
In retrospect, the experimental findings on competitive market behavior called for a revival of the old, classical, view of competition as a collective higgling and bargaining process (as opposed to price-taking behaviors) founded on reservation prices (in place of the utility function). In this pap
Optimal execution of a portfolio have been a challenging problem for institutional investors. Traders face the trade-off between average trading price and uncertainty, and traditional methods suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Here, we propose a four-step numerical framework for the optimal po
Travel time derivatives are financial instruments that derive their value from road travel times, serving as an underlying asset that cannot be directly traded. Within the transportation domain, these derivatives are proposed as a more comprehensive approach to value pricing. They enable road pricin
News can convey bearish or bullish views on financial assets. Institutional investors need to evaluate automatically the implied news sentiment based on textual data. Given the huge amount of news articles published each day, most of which are neutral, we present a systematic news screening method t
Introduction: The paper addresses the challenging problem of predicting the short-term realized volatility of the Bitcoin price using order flow information. The inherent stochastic nature and anti-persistence of price pose difficulties in accurate prediction. Methods: To address this, we propose a
Structural price diffusivity explains many empirical regularities of market impact including the ``square-root law’’ and its crossover to a linear regime for low trading rates \citep{bonart2026diffusive}. One of its central predictions is that an information-neutral trading strategy generates a diff
We model market impact as the response to submitted order flow net of counterflow from latent traders, activated when price displacements from the level that would prevail without the order exceed individual thresholds. Order flow depletes this pool, and a generalized Langevin equation governs its r
Automated execution algorithms are organized into schedule-based and liquidity-seeking families. This paper concerns the first, whose members – Time-Weighted Average Price (TWAP), Volume-Weighted Average Price (VWAP), Percentage of Volume (POV) and Implementation Shortfall – are all model-based: e
We study market making in aggregator-routed RFQ markets where platform routing depends on slowly varying dealer performance scores. We propose a two-tier stochastic control model that separates RFQ-level price competition from a macro routing layer: tier A represents aggregator flow whose opportunit
We study an OTC FX market-making problem, built on the Avellaneda-Stoikov tradition, in which a dealer streams size-dependent quotes on a discrete ladder and manages inventory risk over a finite horizon under Poisson arrivals of trade requests. Adverse selection is modelled through latency-driven pr
We derive the stationary distribution in various regimes of the extended Chiarella model of financial markets. This model is a stochastic nonlinear dynamical system that encompasses dynamical competition between a (saturating) trending and a mean-reverting component. We find the so-called mispricing
This study examines active liquidity management by Indian open-ended equity mutual funds. We find that fund managers respond to inflows by increasing cash holdings, which are later used to purchase less-liquid stocks at favourable valuations. Funds with less liquid portfolios tend to maintain larger
In the rapidly evolving world of financial markets, understanding the dynamics of limit order book (LOB) is crucial for unraveling market microstructure and participant behavior. We introduce ClusterLOB as a method to cluster individual market events in a stream of market-by-order (MBO) data into di
In this paper, we introduce a robust market making framework based on Wasserstein distance, utilizing a stochastic policy approach enhanced by entropy regularization. We demonstrate that, under mild assumptions, the robust market making problem can be reformulated as a convex optimization question.
Because of the theoretical challenges posed by the Efficient Market Hypothesis to technical analysis, the effectiveness of technical indicators in high-frequency trading remains inadequately explored, particularly at the minute-level frequency, where effects of the microstructure of the market domin
While the market impact of aggressive orders has been extensively studied, the impact of passive orders, those executed through limit orders, remains less understood. The goal of this paper is to investigate passive market impact by developing a microstructure model connecting liquidity dynamics and
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