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 →
We study a multi-agent setting in which brokers transact with an informed trader. Through a sequential Stackelberg-type game, brokers manage trading costs and adverse selection with an informed trader. In particular, supplying liquidity to the informed traders allows the brokers to speculate based o
We formulate and solve an optimal trading problem with alpha signals, where transactions induce a nonlinear transient price impact described by a general propagator model, including power-law decay. Using a variational approach, we demonstrate that the optimal trading strategy satisfies a nonlinear
Pricing composite and quanto contracts requires a joint model of both the underlying asset and the exchange rate. In this contribution, we explore the potential of local-correlation models to address the challenges of calibrating synthetic quanto forward contracts and composite options quoted in the
We use random walks to simulate the fluid limit of two coupled diffusive limit order books to model correlation emergence. The model implements the arrival, cancellation and diffusion of orders coupled by a pairs trader profiting from the mean-reversion between the two order books in the fluid limit
We study liquidity provision in the presence of exogenous competition. We consider a reference market maker' who monitors her inventory and the aggregated inventory of the competing market makers. We assume that the competing market makers use a rule of thumb’ to determine their posted depths, dep
As algorithmic trading and electronic markets continue to transform the landscape of financial markets, detecting and deterring rogue agents to maintain a fair and efficient marketplace is crucial. The explosion of large datasets and the continually changing tricks of the trade make it difficult to
In this note we consider the maximization of the expected terminal wealth for the setup of quadratic transaction costs. First, we provide a very simple probabilistic solution to the problem. Although the problem was largely studied, as far as we know up to date this simple and probabilistic form of
We establish the weak convergence of the intensity of a nearly-unstable Hawkes process with heavy-tailed kernel. Our result is used to derive a scaling limit for a financial market model where orders to buy or sell an asset arrive according to a Hawkes process with power-law kernel. After suitable r
We study a toy two-player game for periodic double auction markets to generate liquidity. The game has imperfect information, which allows us to link market spreads with signal strength. We characterize Nash equilibria in cases with or without incentives from the exchange. This enables us to derive
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 imbala
We propose a macroscopic market making model à la Avellaneda-Stoikov, using continuous processes for orders instead of discrete point processes. The model intends to bridge the gap between market making and optimal execution problems, while shedding light on the influence of order flows on the optim
Monetary policy pronouncements by Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) are a major driver of financial market returns. We construct the largest tokenized and annotated dataset of FOMC speeches, meeting minutes, and press conference transcripts in order to understand how monetary policy influences fi
The available liquidity at any time in financial markets falls largely short of the typical size of the orders that institutional investors would trade. In order to reduce the impact on prices due to the execution of large orders, traders in financial markets split large orders into a series of smal
This paper presents a general framework for the design and analysis of exchange mechanisms between two assets that unifies and enables comparisons between the two dominant paradigms for exchange, constant function market markers (CFMMs) and limit order books (LOBs). In our framework, each liquidity
Dealers in foreign exchange markets provide bid and ask prices to their clients at which they are happy to buy and sell, respectively. To manage risk, dealers can skew their quotes and hedge in the interbank market. Hedging offers certainty but comes with transaction costs and market impact. Optimal
We present a mathematical formulation of liquidity provision in decentralized exchanges. We focus on constant function market makers of utility indifference type, which include constant product market makers with concentrated liquidity as a special case. First, we examine no-arbitrage conditions for
The scope of this manuscript is to review some recent developments in statistics for discretely observed semimartingales which are motivated by applications for financial markets. Our journey through this area stops to take closer looks at a few selected topics discussing recent literature. We moreo
We present a model for price dynamics in the Automated Market Makers (AMM) setting. Within this framework, we propose a reference market price following a geometric Brownian motion. The AMM price is constrained by upper and lower bounds, determined by constant multiplications of the reference price.
We consider the strategic interaction of $n$ investors who are able to influence a stock price process and at the same time measure their utilities relative to the other investors. Our main aim is to find Nash equilibrium investment strategies in this setting in a financial market driven by a Browni
In decentralized finance (“DeFi”), automated market makers (AMMs) enable traders to programmatically exchange one asset for another. Such trades are enabled by the assets deposited by liquidity providers (LPs). The goal of this paper is to characterize and interpret the optimal (i.e., profit-maximiz
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