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 →
Triangle fees are a novel fee structure for AMMs, in which marginal fees are decreasing in a trade’s size. That decline is proportional to the movement in the AMM’s implied price, i.e. for every basis point the trade moves the ratio of assets, the marginal fee declines by a basis point. These fees c
We describe how the market-based average and volatility of the “actual” return, which the investors gain within their market sales, depend on the statistical moments, volatilities, and correlations of the current and past market trade values. We describe three successive approximations. First, we de
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) are a class of smart contracts on Ethereum and other blockchains that “make markets” autonomously. In other words, AMMs stand ready to trade with other market participants that interact with them, at the conditions determined by the AMM. In this this paper, which relie
We study the optimal routing problem in decentralized exchanges built on Constant Function Market Makers when trades can be split across multiple heterogeneous pools and execution incurs fixed on-chain costs (gas fees). While prior routing formulations typically abstract from fixed activation costs,
Maglaras, Moallemi, and Zheng (2021) have introduced a flexible queueing model for fragmented limit-order markets, whose fluid limit remains remarkably tractable. In the present study we prove that, in the limit of small and frequent orders, the discrete system indeed converges to the fluid limit, w
We investigate a market with a normal-speed informed trader (IT) who may employ mixed strategy and multiple anticipatory high-frequency traders (HFTs) who are under different inventory pressures, in a three-period Kyle’s model. The pure- and mixed-strategy equilibria are considered and the results p
The role of a market maker is to simultaneously offer to buy and sell quantities of goods, often a financial asset such as a share, at specified prices. An automated market maker (AMM) is a mechanism that offers to trade according to some predetermined schedule; the best choice of this schedule depe
Constant function market makers (CFMMs) are the most popular type of decentralized trading venue for cryptocurrency tokens. In this paper, we give a very general geometric framework (or ‘axioms’) which encompass and generalize many of the known results for CFMMs in the literature, without requiring
We consider an investor who is dynamically informed about the future evolution of one of the independent Brownian motions driving a stock’s price fluctuations. With linear temporary price impact the resulting optimal investment problem with exponential utility turns out to be not only well posed, bu
We consider the Bachelier model with linear price impact. Exponential utility indifference prices are studied for vanilla European options in the case where the investor is required to liquidate her position. Our main result is establishing a non-trivial scaling limit for a vanishing price impact wh
Motivated by discrete price quotes in continuous time, we seek a fundamental theorem based on no arbitrage rather than a condition on limiting trading opportunities. We consider a vector of discounted prices taking values in a locally finite subset of $R^d$ in continuous time. For a locally bounded
Although market participants generally have access to a common information set, they make decisions based on forecasts formed over heterogeneous horizons. Because market impact depends on aggregate positions rather than trader identities, these decisions feed back into prices through their collectiv
The integration of thematic satellite allocations into core-satellite portfolio architectures is commonly approached using factor exposures, discretionary convictions, or backtested performance, with feasibility assessed primarily through liquidity screens or market-impact considerations. While such
The programmable and composable nature of smart contract protocols has enabled the emergence of novel market structures and asset classes that are architecturally frictional to implement in traditional financial paradigms. This fluidity has produced an understudied class of market dynamics, particul
The Santa Fe model is an established econophysics model for describing stochastic dynamics of the limit order book from the viewpoint of the zero-intelligence approach. While its foundation was studied by combining a dimensional analysis and a mean-field theory by E. Smith et al. in Quantitative Fin
In this work we study a continuous time exponential utility maximization problem in the presence of a linear temporary price impact. More precisely, for the case where the risky asset is given by the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck diffusion process we compute the optimal portfolio strategy and the corresponding
Understanding how market participants react to shocks like scheduled macroeconomic news is crucial for both traders and policymakers. We develop a calibrated data generation process DGP that embeds four stylized trader archetypes retail, pension, institutional, and hedge funds into an extended CAPM
Decentralised exchanges (DEXs) have transformed trading by enabling trustless, permissionless transactions, yet they face significant challenges such as impermanent loss and slippage, which undermine profitability for liquidity providers and traders. In this paper, we introduce QubitSwap, an innovat
We study $N$-player optimal execution games in an Obizhaeva–Wang model of transient price impact. When the game is regularized by an instantaneous cost on the trading rate, a unique equilibrium exists and we derive its closed form. Whereas without regularization, there is no equilibrium. We prove th
This paper derives the expressions of correlations between prices of two assets, returns of two assets, and price-return correlations of two assets that depend on statistical moments and correlations of the current values, past values, and volumes of their market trades. The usual frequency-based ex
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