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 →
In this paper, we show how $K$-nearest neighbor ($K$-NN) resampling, an off-policy evaluation method proposed in \cite{“giegrich2023k”}, can be applied to simulate limit order book (LOB) markets and how it can be used to evaluate and calibrate trading strategies. Using historical LOB data, we demons
Generative models aim to simulate realistic effects of various actions across different contexts, from text generation to visual effects. Despite significant efforts to build real-world simulators, the application of generative models to virtual worlds, like financial markets, remains under-explored
Market information events are generated intermittently and disseminated at high speeds in real-time. Market participants consume this high-frequency data to build limit order books, representing the current bids and offers for a given asset. The arrival processes, or the order flow of bid and offer
A novel high-frequency market-making approach in discrete time is proposed that admits closed-form solutions. By taking advantage of demand functions that are linear in the quoted bid and ask spreads with random coefficients, we model the variability of the partial filling of limit orders posted in
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) in Constant Function Market Making is fairly well understood. Does having dynamic weights, as found in liquidity boostrap pools (LBPs), Temporal-function market makers (TFMMs), and Replicating market makers (RMMs), introduce new attack vectors? In this paper we explor
Accurately forecasting the direction of financial returns poses a formidable challenge, given the inherent unpredictability of financial time series. The task becomes even more arduous when applied to cryptocurrency returns, given the chaotic and intricately complex nature of crypto markets. In this
Hawkes Process has been used to model Limit Order Book (LOB) dynamics in several ways in the literature however the focus has been limited to capturing the inter-event times while the order size is usually assumed to be constant. We propose a novel methodology of using Compound Hawkes Process for th
Constant product markets with concentrated liquidity (CL) are the most popular type of automated market makers. In this paper, we characterise the continuous-time wealth dynamics of strategic LPs who dynamically adjust their range of liquidity provision in CL pools. Their wealth results from fee inc
We investigate how liquidity providers (LPs) choose between high- and low-fee trading venues, in the face of a fixed common gas cost. Analyzing Uniswap data, we find that high-fee pools attract 58% of liquidity supply yet execute only 21% of volume. Large LPs dominate low-fee pools, frequently adjus
The bid-ask spread, which is defined by the difference between the best selling price and the best buying price in a Limit Order Book at a given time, is a crucial factor in the analysis of financial securities. In this study, we propose a “State-dependent Spread Hawkes model” (SDSH) that accounts f
We propose a non-linear observation-driven version of the Hasbrouck (1991) model for dynamically estimating trades’ market impact and information content. We find that market impact displays an intraday pattern superimposed with large fluctuations. Some of them are exogenous, and, as an example, we
This paper presents a method for forecasting limit order book durations using a self-exciting flexible residual point process. High-frequency events in modern exchanges exhibit heavy-tailed interarrival times, posing a significant challenge for accurate prediction. The proposed approach incorporates
We propose a Neural Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with Adaptive Granularity Attention (AGA) for high-frequency order flow modeling. The model addresses the challenge of capturing multi-scale temporal dynamics in financial markets, where fine-grained microstructure signals and coarse-grained liquidity tr
VOLARE (VOLatility Archive for Realized Estimates - https://volare.unime.it) is an open research infrastructure providing standardized realized volatility and covariance measures constructed from ultra-high-frequency financial data. The platform processes tick-level observations across equities, exc
How information transmits through prices – and why this transmission breaks down – remains poorly understood. We combine regularized deconvolution with Hawkes process analysis to study the impulse response structure of investor flows in the Korean equity market (January 2020 – February 2025). Thr
This document analyzes price discovery in cryptocurrency markets by comparing centralized and decentralized exchanges, as well as spot and futures markets. The study focuses first on Ethereum (ETH) and then applies a similar approach to Bitcoin (BTC). Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical framework, em
Using data from a live trading experiment on the Binance Bitcoin perpetual, we examine the effects of (i) basic order book mechanics and (ii) the persistence of price changes from immediate to short timescales, revealing the interplay between returns, queue sizes, and orders’ queue positions. We doc
Effective transaction cost is a necessary step for devising any competing financial trading strategy in the absence of quote data. Classically, Roll’s model estimated the transaction cost using the first order autocovariance of the difference between daily transaction prices, while Hasbrouck’s Bayes
This paper introduces oracle-parametrized automated market makers (OP-AMMs), i.e., automated market makers whose quoted price depends jointly on the pool reserves and an external oracle price. In doing so, we extend the information-agnostic AMM framework to settings, such as tokenized securities, fo
Conventional models of matching markets assume that monetary transfers can clear markets by compensating for utility differentials. However, empirical patterns show that such transfers often fail to close structural preference gaps. This paper introduces a market microstructure framework that models
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