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 →
As renewable energy integration accelerates, intraday continuous (IDC) electricity markets have become essential for short-term balancing. However, the simultaneous trading of overlapping contracts with varying granularities creates complex, hidden liquidity dependencies that are critical to market
We study the spread a liquidity provider needs to break even against counterparties that can exploit a stale quote, and we place two defenses on a single scale: repricing sooner and screening informed flow. A break-even condition pins down the exact screening rate at which a slower maker matches a f
A path indistinguishable from its own reverse carries no arrow of time, so time irreversibility is a necessary condition for a directed mechanism to be readable from trajectories alone. In finance it has been measured only on scalar series such as returns and volatility. We define the irreversibilit
The growing importance of intraday trading in Europe, driven by the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources, has led to higher volatility and periods of market stress. Understanding how order flow behaves under varying liquidity conditions requires models that adapt to the state of the ma
We provide a model for the nested optimisation problem of market making and rebate design problems in option markets and find optimal strategies. A single market maker trades multiple European call options in a local-stochastic volatility option market with both make and take strategies, modeled, re
We show that under mild assumptions, the total value of information to informed traders in the market can be measured by the covariance between price changes and order flow. This covariance captures noise trader losses, which equal informed trader gains when market making is competitive. We estimate
Limit order books can transition rapidly from stable to stressed conditions, yet standard early-warning signals such as order flow imbalance and short-term volatility are inherently reactive. We formalise this limitation via a three-regime causal data-generating process (stable $\to$ latent build-up
Adaptive specification search generates statistically significant backtests even under martingale-difference nulls. We introduce a falsification audit testing complete predictive workflows against synthetic reference classes, including zero-predictability environments and microstructure placebos. Wo
We derive the stochastic price process for tokens whose sole price discovery mechanism is a constant-product automated market maker (AMM). When the net flow into the pool follows a diffusion, the token price follows a constant elasticity of variance (CEV) process, nesting Black-Scholes as the limiti
In this work, we investigate the market-making problem on a trading session in which a continuous phase on a limit order book is followed by a closing auction. Whereas standard optimal market-making models typically rely on terminal inventory penalties to manage end-of-day risk, ignoring the signifi
We study the problem of forecasting and optimally trading day-ahead versus real-time (DART) price spreads in U.S. wholesale electricity markets. Building on the framework of Galarneau-Vincent et al., we extend spike prediction from a single zone to a multi-zone setting and treat both positive and ne
Financial markets exhibit an apparent paradox: while directional price movements remain largely unpredictable–consistent with weak-form efficiency–the magnitude of price changes displays systematic structure. Here we demonstrate that real-time order-flow entropy, computed from a 15-state Markov tran
We introduce a novel signature approach for pricing and hedging path-dependent options with instantaneous and permanent market impact under a mean-quadratic variation criterion. Leveraging the expressive power of signatures, we recast an inherently nonlinear and non-Markovian stochastic control prob
The report goes through the main steps of replicating and improving the article “Adaptive Liquidity Provision in Uniswap V3 with Deep Reinforcement Learning.” The replication part includes how to obtain data from the Uniswap Subgraph, details of the implementation, and comments on the results. After
We study the problem of optimal liquidity withdrawal for a representative liquidity provider (LP) in an automated market maker (AMM). LPs earn fees from trading activity but are exposed to impermanent loss (IL) due to price fluctuations. While existing work has focused on static provision and exogen
This paper investigates real-time detection of spoofing activity in limit order books, focusing on cryptocurrency centralized exchanges. We first introduce novel order flow variables based on multi-scale Hawkes processes that account both for the size and placement distance from current best prices
Probabilistic intraday electricity price forecasting is becoming increasingly important with the growth of renewable generation and the rise in demand-side engagement. Their uncertainties have increased the trading risks closer to delivery and the subsequent imbalance settlement costs. As a conseque
This study investigates the development of an optimal execution strategy through reinforcement learning, aiming to determine the most effective approach for traders to buy and sell inventory within a finite time horizon. Our proposed model leverages input features derived from the current state of t
Multifractality is a concept that helps compactly grasping the most essential features of the financial dynamics. In its fully developed form, this concept applies to essentially all mature financial markets and even to more liquid cryptocurrencies traded on the centralized exchanges. A new element
Automated Market Makers (AMMs) hold assets and are constantly being rebalanced by external arbitrageurs to match external market prices. Loss-versus-rebalancing (LVR) is a pivotal metric for measuring how an AMM pool performs for its liquidity providers (LPs) relative to an idealised benchmark where
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