New Economics Papers
on Market Microstructure
Issue of 2012‒11‒03
six papers chosen by
Thanos Verousis


  1. Heavy-Tailed Features and Empirical Analysis of the Limit Order Book Volume Profiles in Futures Markets By Kylie-Anne Richards; Gareth W. Peters; William Dunsmuir
  2. High Frequency Market Making By Rene Carmona; Kevin Webster
  3. Realized mixed-frequency factor models for vast dimensional covariance estimation By Bannouh, K.; Martens, M.P.E.; Oomen, R.C.A.; Dijk, D.J.C. van
  4. A Model of Market Limit Orders By Stochastic PDE's, Parameter Estimation, and Investment Optimization By Zhi Zheng; Richard B. Sowers
  5. High quality topic extraction from business news explains abnormal financial market volatility By Ryohei Hisano; Didier Sornette; Takayuki Mizuno; Takaaki Ohnishi; Tsutomu Watanabe
  6. Financial Disclosure and Market Transparency with Costly Information Processing By Marco di Maggio; Marco Pagano

  1. By: Kylie-Anne Richards; Gareth W. Peters; William Dunsmuir
    Abstract: This paper poses a few fundamental questions regarding the attributes of the volume profile of a Limit Order Books stochastic structure by taking into consideration aspects of intraday and interday statistical features, the impact of different exchange features and the impact of market participants in different asset sectors. This paper aims to address the following questions: 1. Is there statistical evidence that heavy-tailed sub-exponential volume profiles occur at different levels of the Limit Order Book on the bid and ask and if so does this happen on intra or interday time scales ? 2.In futures exchanges, are heavy tail features exchange (CBOT, CME, EUREX, SGX and COMEX) or asset class (government bonds, equities and precious metals) dependent and do they happen on ultra-high (<1sec) or mid-range (1sec -10min) high frequency data? 3.Does the presence of stochastic heavy-tailed volume profile features evolve in a manner that would inform or be indicative of market participant behaviors, such as high frequency algorithmic trading, quote stuffing and price discovery intra-daily? 4. Is there statistical evidence for a need to consider dynamic behavior of the parameters of models for Limit Order Book volume profiles on an intra-daily time scale ? Progress on aspects of each question is obtained via statistically rigorous results to verify the empirical findings for an unprecedentedly large set of futures market LOB data. The data comprises several exchanges, several futures asset classes and all trading days of 2010, using market depth (Type II) order book data to 5 levels on the bid and ask.
    Date: 2012–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1210.7215&r=mst
  2. By: Rene Carmona; Kevin Webster
    Abstract: Since they were authorized by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in 1998, electronic exchanges have boomed, and by 2010 high frequency trading accounted for over 70% of equity trades in the US. Such markets are thought to increase liquidity because of the presence of market makers, who are willing to trade as counterparties at any time, in exchange for a fee, the bid-ask spread. In this paper, we propose an equilibrium model showing how such market makers provide liquidity. The model relies on a codebook for client trades, the implied alpha. After solving the individual clients optimization problems and identifying their implied alphas, we frame the market maker stochastic optimization problem as a stochastic control problem with an infinite dimensional control variable. Assuming either identical time horizons for all the clients, or a stochastic partial differential equation model for their beliefs, we solve the market maker problem and derive tractable formulas for the optimal strategy and the resulting limit-order book dynamics.
    Date: 2012–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1210.5781&r=mst
  3. By: Bannouh, K.; Martens, M.P.E.; Oomen, R.C.A.; Dijk, D.J.C. van
    Abstract: We introduce a Mixed-Frequency Factor Model (MFFM) to estimate vast dimensional covari- ance matrices of asset returns. The MFFM uses high-frequency (intraday) data to estimate factor (co)variances and idiosyncratic risk and low-frequency (daily) data to estimate the factor loadings. We propose the use of highly liquid assets such as exchange traded funds (ETFs) as factors. Prices for these contracts are observed essentially free of microstructure noise at high frequencies, allowing us to obtain precise estimates of the factor covariances. The factor loadings instead are estimated from daily data to avoid biases due to market microstructure effects such as the relative illiquidity of individual stocks and non-synchronicity between the returns on factors and stocks. Our theoretical, simulation and empirical results illustrate that the performance of the MFFM is excellent, both compared to conventional factor models based solely on low-frequency data and to popular realized covariance estimators based on high-frequency data.
    Keywords: dimensional covariance estimation;mixed-frequency factor models
    Date: 2012–10–23
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:eureri:1765037470&r=mst
  4. By: Zhi Zheng; Richard B. Sowers
    Abstract: In this paper we introduce a completely continuous and time-variate model of the evolution of market limit orders based on the existence, uniqueness, and regularity of the solutions to a type of stochastic partial differential equations obtained in Zheng and Sowers (2012). In contrary to several models proposed and researched in literature, this model provides complete continuity in both time and price inherited from the stochastic PDE, and thus is particularly suitable for the cases where transactions happen in an extremely fast pace, such as those delivered by high frequency traders (HFT's). We first elaborate the precise definition of the model with its associated parameters, and show its existence and uniqueness from the related mathematical results given a fixed set of parameters. Then we statistically derive parameter estimation schemes of the model using maximum likelihood and least mean-square-errors estimation methods under certain criteria such as AIC to accommodate to variant number of parameters . Finally as a typical economics and finance use case of the model we settle the investment optimization problem in both static and dynamic sense by analysing the stochastic (It\^{o}) evolution of the utility function of an investor or trader who takes the model and its parameters as exogenous. Two theorems are proved which provide criteria for determining the best (limit) price and time point to make the transaction.
    Date: 2012–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1210.7230&r=mst
  5. By: Ryohei Hisano; Didier Sornette; Takayuki Mizuno; Takaaki Ohnishi; Tsutomu Watanabe
    Abstract: Understanding the mutual relationships between information flows and social activity in society today is one of the cornerstones of the social sciences. In financial economics, the key issue in this regard is understanding and quantifying how news of all possible types (geopolitical, environmental, social, financial, economic, etc.) affect trading and the pricing of firms in organized stock markets. In this paper we seek to address this issue by performing an analysis of more than 24 million news records provided by Thompson Reuters and of their relationship with trading activity for 205 major stocks in the S&P US stock index. We show that the whole landscape of news that affect stock price movements can be automatically summarized via simple regularized regressions between trading activity and news information pieces decomposed, with the help of simple topic modeling techniques, into their "thematic" features. Using these methods, we are able to estimate and quantify the impacts of news on trading. We introduce network-based visualization techniques to represent the whole landscape of news information associated with a basket of stocks. The examination of the words that are representative of the topic distributions confirms that our method is able to extract the significant pieces of information influencing the stock market. Our results show that one of the most puzzling stylized fact in financial economies, namely that at certain times trading volumes appear to be "abnormally large," can be explained by the flow of news. In this sense, our results prove that there is no "excess trading," if the news are genuinely novel and provide relevant financial information.
    Date: 2012–10
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:1210.6321&r=mst
  6. By: Marco di Maggio (MIT); Marco Pagano (Università di Napoli Federico II, CSEF, EIEF and CEPR)
    Abstract: We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from trading, hedgers do the same, depressing the asset price. Market transparency reinforces this mechanism, by making speculators’ trades more visible to hedgers. As a consequence, asset sellers will oppose both the disclosure of fundamentals and trading transparency. This is socially inefficient if a large fraction of market participants are speculators and hedgers have low processing costs. But in these circumstances, forbidding hedgers’ access to the market may dominate mandatory disclosure.
    Date: 2012–10–23
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sef:csefwp:323&r=mst

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