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We establish connections between optimal transport theory and the dynamic version of the Kyle model, including new characterizations of informed trading profits via conjugate duality and Monge-Kantorovich duality. We use these connections to extend the model to multiple assets, general distributions, and risk-averse market makers. With risk-averse market makers, liquidity is lower, assets exhibit short-term reversals…
We study Nash equilibria for inventory-averse high-frequency traders (HFTs), who trade to exploit information about future price changes. For discrete trading rounds, the HFTs' optimal trading strategies and their equilibrium price impact are described by a system of nonlinear equations; explicit solutions obtain around the continuous-time limit. Unlike in the risk-neutral case, the optimal inventories become mean-re…
Market makers provide liquidity to other market participants: they propose prices at which they stand ready to buy and sell a wide variety of assets. They face a complex optimization problem with both static and dynamic components. They need indeed to propose bid and offer/ask prices in an optimal way for making money out of the difference between these two prices (their bid-ask spread). Since they seldom buy and sel…
We propose a continuous-time stock-flow consistent model for inventory dynamics in an economy with firms, banks, and households. On the supply side, firms decide on production based on adaptive expectations for sales demand and a desired level of inventories. On the demand side, investment is determined as a function of utilization and profitability and can be financed by debt, whereas consumption is independently de…
High Frequency Trading (HFT) represents an ever growing proportion of all financial transactions as most markets have now switched to electronic order book systems. The main goal of the paper is to propose continuous time equations which generalize the self-financing relationships of frictionless markets to electronic markets with limit order books. We use NASDAQ ITCH data to identify significant empirical features s…
We study liquidity on decentralized exchanges (DEXs), identifying factors at the platform, blockchain, token pair, and liquidity pool levels with predictive power for market depth metrics. We introduce the v2 counterfactual spread metric, a novel criterion which assesses the degree of liquidity concentration in pools using the ``concentrated liquidity'' mechanism, allowing us to decompose the effect of a factor on ma…
We study the optimal order placement strategy with the presence of a liquidity cost. In this problem, a stock trader wishes to clear her large inventory by a predetermined time horizon $T$. A trader uses both limit and market orders, and a large market order faces an adverse price movement caused by the liquidity risk. First, we study a single period model where the trader places a limit order and/or a market order a…
We study a continuous-time version of the intermediation model of Grossman and Miller (1988). To wit, we solve for the competitive equilibrium prices at which liquidity takers' demands are absorbed by dealers with quadratic inventory costs, who can in turn gradually transfer these positions to an exogenous open market with finite liquidity. This endogenously leads to transient price impact in the dealer market. Smoot…
This paper studies how market informedness affects market makers' profitability in a computational market environment with heterogeneous learning agents. We develop an agent-based market model in which market makers differ in their information sets and inventory-risk aversion, prices form endogenously, fundamental values evolve exogenously, and market-taker order flow follows a state-dependent self-exciting process. …
This paper develops a model for option market making in which the hedging activity of the market maker generates price impact on the underlying asset. The option order flow is modeled by Cox processes, with intensities depending on the state of the underlying and on the market maker's quoted prices. The resulting dynamics combine stochastic option demand with both permanent and transient impact on the underlying, lea…
We study strategic interactions in a broker-mediated market in which agents learn and exploit each other's private information. A broker provides liquidity to an informed trader and to noise traders while managing inventory in a lit market. The informed trader infers the broker's trading activity in the lit market, while the broker estimates the trader's private signal. Information leakage in the client's trading flo…
In FX cash markets, market makers provide liquidity to clients for a wide variety of currency pairs. Because of flow uncertainty and market volatility, they face inventory risk. To mitigate this risk, they typically skew their prices to attract or divert the flow and trade with their peers on the dealer-to-dealer segment of the market for hedging purposes. This paper offers a mathematical framework to FX dealers will…
We consider an exchange who wishes to set suitable make-take fees to attract liquidity on its platform. Using a principal-agent approach, we are able to describe in quasi-explicit form the optimal contract to propose to a market maker. This contract depends essentially on the market maker inventory trajectory and on the volatility of the asset. We also provide the optimal quotes that should be displayed by the market…
Market makers continuously set bid and ask quotes for the stocks they have under consideration. Hence they face a complex optimization problem in which their return, based on the bid-ask spread they quote and the frequency at which they indeed provide liquidity, is challenged by the price risk they bear due to their inventory. In this paper, we consider a stochastic control problem similar to the one introduced by Ho…
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 a limit order book (LOB). As a result, we uncover new patterns as to how the demand's randomness affects the optimal pla…
In this paper, we employ the Heston stochastic volatility model to describe the stock's volatility and apply the model to derive and analyze the optimal trading strategies for dealers in a security market. We also extend our study to option market making for options written on stocks in the presence of stochastic volatility. Mathematically, the problem is formulated as a stochastic optimal control problem and the con…
In this paper we extend the market-making models with inventory constraints of Avellaneda and Stoikov ("High-frequency trading in a limit-order book", Quantitative Finance Vol.8 No.3 2008) and Gueant, Lehalle and Fernandez-Tapia ("Dealing with inventory risk", Preprint 2011) to the case of a rather general class of mid-price processes, under either exponential or linear PNL utility functions, and we add an inventory-…
We empirically study the trading activity in the electronic on-book segment and in the dealership off-book segment of the London Stock Exchange, investigating separately the trading of active market members and of other market participants which are non-members. We find that (i) the volume distribution of off-book transactions has a significantly fatter tail than the one of on-book transactions, (ii) groups of member…