market microstructure

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pages: 209 words: 13,138

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading by Joel Hasbrouck

Alvin Roth, barriers to entry, business cycle, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, discrete time, disintermediation, distributed generation, experimental economics, financial intermediation, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, payment for order flow, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, selection bias, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, two-sided market, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

Equity Markets 166 Notes 179 References 183 Index 196 ix This page intentionally left blank Empirical Market Microstructure This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction 1.1 Overview Market microstructure is the study of the trading mechanisms used for financial securities. There is no “microstructure manifesto,” and historical antecedents to the field can probably be found going back to the beginning of written language, but at some point, the field acquired a distinct identity. As good a starting point as any is the coinage of the term market microstructure in the paper of the same title by Garman (1976): We depart from the usual approaches of the theory of exchange by (1) making the assumption of asynchronous, temporally discrete market activities on the part of market agents and (2) adopting a viewpoint which treats the temporal microstructure, i.e., moment-to-moment aggregate exchange behavior, as an important descriptive aspect of such markets.

Amihud, Yakov, and Haim Mendelson, 1987, Trading mechanisms and stock returns: An empirical investigation, Journal of Finance 42, 533–53. Amihud, Yakov, and Haim Mendelson, 1991. Market microstructure and price discovery on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, in William T. Ziemba, Warren Bailley, and Yasushi Hamao, eds., Japanese Financial Market Research, Contributions to Economic Analysis, no. 205 (North Holland, Amsterdam). Amihud, Yakov, Haim Mendelson, and Maurizio Murgia, 1990, Stock market microstructure and return volatility: Evidence from Italy, Journal of Banking and Finance 14, 423–40. Amihud, Yakov, Haim Mendelson, and Lasse Heje Pedersen, 2005, Market microstructure and asset pricing (Stern School, New York University). 183 184 REFERENCES Angel, James J., 1994, Limit versus market orders (School of Business Administration, Georgetown University).

Empirical Market Microstructure This page intentionally left blank Empirical Market Microstructure The Institutions, Economics, and Econometrics of Securities Trading Joel Hasbrouck 1 2007 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2007 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved.


High-Frequency Trading by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado, Maureen O'Hara

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, computer vision, continuous double auction, dark matter, discrete time, finite state, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Large Hadron Collider, latency arbitrage, margin call, market design, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, National best bid and offer, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Tobin tax, transaction costs, two-sided market, yield curve

Marcos holds two doctorate degrees from Complutense University, is a recipient of the National Award for Excellence in Academic Performance (Government of Spain), and was admitted into American Mensa with a perfect test score. Maureen O’Hara is the Robert W. Purcell professor of finance at the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University. Her research focuses on market microstructure, and she is the author of numerous journal articles as well as the book Market Microstructure Theory. Maureen serves on several corporate boards, and is chairman of the board of ITG, a global agency brokerage firm. She is a member of the CFTC-SEC Emerging Regulatory Issues Task Force (the “flash crash” committee), the Global Advisory Board of the Securities Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Advisory Board of the Office of Financial Research, US Treasury.

Alex holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Geneva and has gained further research experience by working at the University of Oxford and at ETH. Anton Golub has worked at OLSEN since the summer of 2012 as a member of the research team. He performs research in the field of market micro-structure, leveraging the methodology developed at OLSEN. Anton previously worked at the Manchester Business School as a researcher on high-frequency trading, market microstructure and flash crashes. In 2012, he was invited to participate in an international project on computerised trading funded by the ix i i i i i i “Easley” — 2013/10/8 — 11:31 — page x — #10 i i HIGH-FREQUENCY TRADING UK Treasury.

US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, 2010, “Finding Regarding the Market Events of May 6”, Technical Report, September. 89 i i i i i i “Easley” — 2013/10/8 — 11:31 — page 90 — #110 i i i i i i i i “Easley” — 2013/10/8 — 11:31 — page 91 — #111 i i 5 Machine Learning for Market Microstructure and High-Frequency Trading Michael Kearns and Yuriy Nevmyvaka University of Pennsylvania In this chapter, we give an overview of the uses of machine learning for high-frequency trading (HFT) and market microstructure data and problems. Machine learning is a vibrant subfield of computer science that draws on models and methods from statistics, algorithms, computational complexity, artificial intelligence, control theory and a variety of other disciplines.


pages: 354 words: 26,550

High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial intermediation, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, pneumatic tube, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, tail risk, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

., 274, 275, 277, 281, 292–293, 298 Management fees, 32 Margin call close order, 70 Market-aggressiveness selection, 274, 275–276 Market breadth, 62 Market depth, 62, 133 Market efficiency: predictability and, 78–79 profit opportunities and, 75–78 testing for, 79–89 MarketFactory, 25 Market impact costs, 290–293 Market microstructure trading, 4, 127–128 Market microstructure trading, information models, 129, 145–164 asymmetric information measures, 146–148 INDEX bid-ask spreads, 149–157 order aggressiveness, 157–160 order flow, 160–163 Market microstructure trading, inventory models, 127–143 liquidity provision, 133–134, 139–143 order types, 130–131 overview, 129–130 price adjustments, 127–128 profitable market making problems, 134–139 trader types, 131–133 Market-neutral arbitrage, 192–195 Market orders, versus limit orders, 61–63 Market participants, 24–26 Market resilience, inventory trading, 133 Market risk, 252, 253 hedging and, 269–270 measuring of, 254–260 stop losses and, 266 Markov switching models, 110–111 Markowitz, Harry, 202, 209, 213, 214, 295 Mark to market, risk measurement and, 263 Martell, Terrence, 158–159 Martingale hypothesis, market efficiency tests based on, 86–88 MatLab, 25 Maximum drawdown, 50–51 McQueen, Grant V., 179 Mean absolute deviation (MAD), 220–221 Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), 221 Mean-reversion.

HG4529.A43 2010 332.64–dc22 2009029276 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my family Contents Acknowledgments xi CHAPTER 1 Introduction 1 CHAPTER 2 Evolution of High-Frequency Trading 7 Financial Markets and Technological Innovation Evolution of Trading Methodology CHAPTER 3 Overview of the Business of High-Frequency Trading 7 13 21 Comparison with Traditional Approaches to Trading 22 Market Participants 24 Operating Model 26 Economics 32 Capitalizing a High-Frequency Trading Business 34 Conclusion 35 CHAPTER 4 Financial Markets Suitable for High-Frequency Trading 37 Financial Markets and Their Suitability for High-Frequency Trading Conclusion 38 47 v vi CHAPTER 5 CONTENTS Evaluating Performance of High-Frequency Strategies 49 Basic Return Characteristics 49 Comparative Ratios 51 Performance Attribution 57 Other Considerations in Strategy Evaluation 58 Conclusion 60 CHAPTER 6 Orders, Traders, and Their Applicability to High-Frequency Trading 61 Order Types 61 Order Distributions 70 Conclusion 73 CHAPTER 7 Market Inefficiency and Profit Opportunities at Different Frequencies 75 Predictability of Price Moves at High Frequencies 78 Conclusion 89 CHAPTER 8 Searching for High-Frequency Trading Opportunities 91 Statistical Properties of Returns 91 Linear Econometric Models 97 Volatility Modeling 102 Nonlinear Models 108 Conclusion 114 CHAPTER 9 Working with Tick Data 115 Properties of Tick Data 116 Quantity and Quality of Tick Data 117 Bid-Ask Spreads 118 Contents vii Bid-Ask Bounce 120 Modeling Arrivals of Tick Data 121 Applying Traditional Econometric Techniques to Tick Data 123 Conclusion 125 CHAPTER 10 Trading on Market Microstructure: Inventory Models 127 Overview of Inventory Trading Strategies 129 Orders, Traders, and Liquidity 130 Profitable Market Making 134 Directional Liquidity Provision 139 Conclusion 143 CHAPTER 11 Trading on Market Microstructure: Information Models 145 Measures of Asymmetric Information 146 Information-Based Trading Models 149 Conclusion 164 CHAPTER 12 Event Arbitrage 165 Developing Event Arbitrage Trading Strategies 165 What Constitutes an Event?

However, several researchers find that technical analysis still has legs: Brock, Lakonishok, and LeBaron (1992) find that moving averages can predict future abnormal returns, while Aldridge (2009a) shows 14 HIGH-FREQUENCY TRADING that moving averages, “stochastics” and relative strength indicators (RSI) may succeed in generating profitable trading signals on intra-day data sampled at hourly intervals. In a way, technical analysis was a precursor of modern microstructure theory. Even though market microstructure applies at a much higher frequency and with a much higher degree of sophistication than technical analysis, both market microstructure and technical analysis work to infer market supply and demand from past price movements. Much of the contemporary high-frequency trading is based on detecting latent market information from the minute changes in the most recent price movements.


pages: 443 words: 51,804

Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani, Ionut Florescu

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business process, buy and hold, continuous integration, corporate governance, discrete time, distributed generation, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, housing crisis, implied volatility, incomplete markets, linear programming, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Menlo Park, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, power law, principal–agent problem, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process

Comment on P. R. Hansen and A. Lunde: realized variance and market microstructure noise. J Bus Econ Stat 2006;24:173–179. Andersen T, Bollerslev T, Meddahi N. Realized volatility forecasting and market microstructure noise. J Econometrics 2010;160:220–234. Bandi FM, Russel JR. Realized covariation, realized beta and microstructure noise. Working Paper, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, 2005. Bandi FM, Russel JR. Separating market microstructure noise from volatility. J Financ Econ 2006;79:655–692. Bandi FM, Russell JR. Market microstructure noise, integrated variance estimators, and the accuracy of asymptotic approximations.

., xiv, 347, 383 Market capitalization index, 128 Market completeness assumption, 302 Market complexity, modeling of, 99 Market crash, 346 2008, 136 Market index (indices) exponents calculated for, 345 squared returns of, 220 technique for producing, 110 Market index decrease, spread and, 105 Market inefficiencies, for small-space and mid-volume classes, 44 Market microstructure effects, 263 Market microstructure, effects on Fourier estimator, 245 Market microstructure contaminations, 273 Market microstructure model, of ultra high frequency trading, 235–242 Market model, 296–297 Market movement, indicators of, 110 Market reaction, to abnormal price movements, 45 Market-traded option prices, 219 Markov chain, stochastic volatility process with, 401 Markowitz-type optimization, 286 Martingale-difference process, 178.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The authors are most grateful for the comments and suggestions received from the anonymous reviewers of this chapter and to other participants at the Conference on Modeling High Frequency Data II at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Support funding for this research is also acknowledged to ICASA (Institute of Complex Additive Systems Analysis), New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. 242 CHAPTER 9 A Market Microstructure Model REFERENCES Ait-Shalia Y, Yu J. High frequency market microstructure noise estimates and liquidity measures. Ann Appl Stat 2009;1:422–457. Campbell JY, Lo AW, MacKinlay C. The econometrics of financial markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 1997. CFTC-SEC. Findings regarding the market events of May 6, 2010; September 30, 2010.


pages: 571 words: 105,054

Advances in Financial Machine Learning by Marcos Lopez de Prado

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, backtesting, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business process, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, G4S, Higgs boson, implied volatility, information asymmetry, latency arbitrage, margin call, market fragmentation, market microstructure, martingale, NP-complete, P = NP, p-value, paper trading, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, traveling salesman

Instead, the bar size could be adjusted dynamically as a function of the free-floating market capitalization of a company (in the case of stocks), or the outstanding amount of issued debt (in the case of fixed-income securities). 2.3.2 Information-Driven Bars The purpose of information-driven bars is to sample more frequently when new information arrives to the market. In this context, the word “information” is used in a market microstructural sense. As we will see in Chapter 19, market microstructure theories confer special importance to the persistence of imbalanced signed volumes, as that phenomenon is associated with the presence of informed traders. By synchronizing sampling with the arrival of informed traders, we may be able to make decisions before prices reach a new equilibrium level.

They conclude that on timescales of less than a few hours, the persistence of order flow is overwhelmingly due to splitting rather than herding. Given that market microstructure theory attributes the persistency of order flow imbalance to the presence of informed traders, it makes sense to measure the strength of such persistency through the serial correlation of the signed volumes. Such a feature would be complementary to the features we studied in Section 19.5. 19.7 What Is Microstructural Information? Let me conclude this chapter by addressing what I consider to be a major flaw in the market microstructure literature. Most articles and books on this subject study asymmetric information, and how strategic agents utilize it to profit from market makers.

Let us review some of the stations involved in the chain of production within a modern asset manager. 1.3.1.1 Data Curators This is the station responsible for collecting, cleaning, indexing, storing, adjusting, and delivering all data to the production chain. The values could be tabulated or hierarchical, aligned or misaligned, historical or real-time feeds, etc. Team members are experts in market microstructure and data protocols such as FIX. They must develop the data handlers needed to understand the context in which that data arises. For example, was a quote cancelled and replaced at a different level, or cancelled without replacement? Each asset class has its own nuances. For instance, bonds are routinely exchanged or recalled; stocks are subjected to splits, reverse-splits, voting rights, etc.; futures and options must be rolled; currencies are not traded in a centralized order book.


pages: 119 words: 10,356

Topics in Market Microstructure by Ilija I. Zovko

Brownian motion, computerized trading, continuous double auction, correlation coefficient, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, information asymmetry, market design, market friction, market microstructure, Murray Gell-Mann, p-value, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs

CONTENTS 3.5 Supplementary Material . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.1 Literature review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.2 Dimensional analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.3 The London Stock Exchange (LSE) data set . 3.5.4 Opening auction, real order types, time . . . 3.5.5 Measurement of model parameters . . . . . . 3.5.6 Estimating the errors for the regressions . . . 3.5.7 Market impact . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5.8 Extending the model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Correlation and clustering in the trading of the members of the LSE 4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.1 The LSE dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1.2 Measuring correlations between strategies . . . 4.2 Significance and structure in the correlation matrices . 4.2.1 Density of the correlation matrix eigenvalue distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2.2 Bootstrapping the largest eigenvalues . . . . . 4.2.3 Clustering of trading behaviour . . . . . . . . . 4.2.4 Time persistence of correlations . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 37 40 41 43 44 48 52 56 59 59 60 60 64 64 67 68 71 75 5 Market imbalances and stock returns: heterogeneity of order sizes at the LSE 5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 Distribution of order sizes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 Order size heterogen. and stock returns . . . . . . . . 5.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 77 80 82 94 6 Conclusions 97 vi Chapter 1 Introduction The topic of this thesis is Market microstructure. Market microstructure is an area of finance that studies the dynamics and processes through which investors’ forecasts about future asset values are ultimately translated into the assets’ current prices and trading volumes. The field encompasses also the study of trading rules which regulate the markets and constrain the actions of traders. In even broader terms, research directions that deal with the interrelation between institutional structure, strategic behavior, prices and welfare are all considered market microstructure. The topics investigated in this thesis are also related to the field of Econophysics.

Topics in Market Microstructure Ilija I. Zovko Topics in M a rk et Microstru c t u re ! The publication of this book is in part made possible by the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF) at the University of Amsterdam Lay out: LaTeX, http://www.latex-project.org/ Cover design: René Staelenberg, Amsterdam Cover illustration: Wordle by Jonathan Feinberg, http://wordle.net/ ISBN 978 90 5629 538 7 NUR 780 © I. I. Zovko / Vossiuspers UvA – Amsterdam University Press, 2008 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. !

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. ! Topics in Market Microstructure Academisch Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op dinsdag 4 november 2008, te 12.00 uur door Ilija I.


pages: 321

Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies by Igor Tulchinsky

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, data science, deep learning, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, natural language processing, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, systematic trading, text mining, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

These patterns affect the realized return most trivially via the effects of trading turnover – the channel referred to as impact – but they also have indirect effects on alpha performance and can themselves be sources of alpha signals, through characteristics related to the intraday dynamics of the traded assets. Collectively, these properties of the asset market define the market microstructure. Research in market microstructure, as its name suggests, aims to capture the structure of investors by separating distinct classes that differ in their behavior or motivation for trading. Since the milestone paper of Glosten and Milgrom (1985), a wide variety of microstructural patterns has been discovered and documented to significantly affect the expected returns of assets.

Second, we discuss the notion of the illiquidity premium that stands for the positive relationship between expected returns and liquidity, with examples for potential alphas. Third, we present mainstream market microstructure models and their implications for asset prices. Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies, Second Edition. Edited by Igor Tulchinsky et al. and WorldQuant Virtual Research Center. © 2020 Tulchinsky et al., WorldQuant Virtual Research Center. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 208 Finding Alphas DATA IN MARKET MICROSTRUCTURE Capital markets can be broadly classified as two types, based on their trading structure. In quote-driven markets, specialists – market participants, also known as market makers or dealers, who serve as counterparties for transactions at their quoted price – provide investors with the opportunity to trade and guarantee the execution at their unique bid and ask prices: the prices at which they are willing to buy and sell, respectively.

Trivially, alphas whose trading is concentrated in periods when volume is high and spreads are low perform better after costs. The aforementioned empirical evidence for a positive intraday correlation between spreads and return volatility leads us to question its theoretical basis – that is, how spreads are determined and, in particular, how market microstructure is involved in these patterns. MARKET MICROSTRUCTURE AND EXPECTED RETURNS Apart from allowing us to model the dynamics of liquidity, intraday data enables analysis of the interaction among market participants. In fact, the goal of the latter research direction is often set to find theoretical explanations for empirical patterns documented by the former. 212 Finding Alphas The theories of microstructure take into account the price discovery process and, in general, differentiate among informed traders, uninformed traders, and specialists.


pages: 1,164 words: 309,327

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

active measures, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, compound rate of return, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, job automation, junk bonds, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fragmentation, market friction, market microstructure, money market fund, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, Nick Leeson, open economy, passive investing, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, price discovery process, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, search costs, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, two-sided market, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Martin and J. William Petty Debt Management: A Practitioner’s Guide John D. Finnerty and Douglas R. Emery Real Estate Investment Trusts: Structure, Performance, and Investment Opportunities Su Han Chan, John Erickson, and Ko Wang Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners Larry Harris Trading and Exchanges market microstructure for Practitioners LARRY HARRIS Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

We will not consider how to value them, who should trade them, how to design them, or how to issue them. Books about investments and corporate finance examine these questions. Market microstructure is the branch of financial economics that investigates trading and the organization of markets. This field of study has substantially grown in size and importance since the October 1987 stock market crash. This book presents the economics of market microstructure in simple English prose. Although some simple mathematics and graphics appear in a few supplementary examples, I fully explain all essential concepts in the main text. 1.2 OBJECTIVES This book will help you understand how markets work, and how governments and exchanges regulate them.

The omission of many excellent works from this bibliography therefore reflects more on me than on them. General Works Belonsky, Gail M., and David M. Modest. 1993. Market microstructure: An empirical retrospective. Working paper, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Cohen, Kalman J., Steven F. Maier, Robert A. Schwartz, and David K. Whitcomb. 1986. The Microstructure of Securities Markets (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ). Coughenour, Jay, and Kuldeep Shastri. 1999. Symposium on market microstructure: A review of empirical research. Financial Review 34(4), 1–28. Dalton, John M., ed. 1993. How the Stock Market Works (New York Institute of Finance, New York).


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

“Andrei had this grand ambition to build a research enterprise to address that.” Kirilenko prided himself on being a dispassionate scientist, but there was something about the industry’s “nothing to see here” attitude that stuck in his craw. The general public and the press may not have been able to grapple with the finer points of market microstructure, but he sure as hell could; and his work on the crash had shown him that some of the biggest HFT firms weren’t just selflessly providing liquidity. It was a convenient illusion. In late 2012, Adam Clark-Joseph, a young Harvard PhD who spent time at the CFTC, issued a paper titled “Exploratory Trading” that posited that HFT firms routinely fired small, loss-making orders into the market like sonar to gather what he described as “private” information about market conditions before placing much larger orders when they knew they were more likely to profit.

He was certainly well positioned to understand the issues at hand. In spring 2012, Thakkar was one of two dozen or so experts from across the futures industry invited to join a new committee set up by the CFTC to examine how regulators might better understand and oversee high-frequency trading. The subcommittee Thakkar was a part of, Market Microstructure, was tasked with exploring the negative and positive ways automated trading impacted markets, and its members talked about spoofing during their regular conference calls and meetings. (Thakkar would remain on the committee for two years, during which Edge continued working on different iterations of NAVTrader.)

Others conceded there had been an oversight. We “should have seen this,” said Cornell University’s Maureen O’Hara, who sat on the committee set up by CFTC chairman Gary Gensler to oversee the first inquiry. “Nowadays, market manipulation doesn’t just involve the trades. It’s about the orders.” For academics interested in market microstructure, Sarao’s case reignited a long-running debate about the extent to which unconsummated orders, including spoofs, really impact prices. The University of Houston’s Craig Pirrong, who blogs under the name “The Streetwise Professor,” suggested that Terry Hendershott, the UC Berkeley finance professor and expert witness for the government, had shown that Sarao’s trading had such a small bearing on prices that it served only to undermine the CFTC’s case.


pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

Had that meaning survived in today’s everyday usage, which it has not, the entire perspective I’m taking could simply be called “mundane political economy,” even if that might not help boost this book’s sales. 24. What participants mean by “market structure” is similar to what financial economists (following Garman 1976) call “market microstructure”—i.e., “the process by which investors’ latent demands are ultimately translated into prices and volumes” (Madhavan 2000: 205)—a field of study that is touched on briefly at the start of chapter 3. The literature in economics on financial-market microstructure is valuable, but is largely “depoliticized”: although contributors to it are certainly aware that there is often intense conflict over market structure, that conflict, and especially its political aspects, is only occasionally the focus of their analytical attention.

HFT firms had boosted trading volumes on exchanges and other trading venues with HFT-friendly features, while other venues were, first, forced by competition to adopt those features, and then chose to embrace them as ways of earning revenue. ATD’s chief inspiration was cofounder David Whitcomb, an academic economist. He taught finance at Rutgers University until his retirement in 1999, and was one of the pioneers of market microstructure theory. While much of economics “abstracts from the mechanics of trading” (O’Hara 1997: 1), researchers in this new field modeled and investigated empirically how particular ways of organizing trading can influence outcomes, and how intermediaries such as market-makers set their prices.1 A crucial step in Whitcomb’s path from this academic specialism to the practice of high-frequency trading was a consultancy contract.

Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave Macmillan. Gabor, Daniela. 2016. “The (Impossible) Repo Trinity: The Political Economy of Repo Markets.” Review of International Political Economy 23/6: 967–1000. Galison, Peter. 2003. Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: Norton. Garman, Mark B. 1976. “Market Microstructure.” Journal of Financial Economics 3/3: 257–275. Godechot, Olivier. 2007. Working rich: Salaires, bonus et appropriation du profit dans l’industrie financière. Paris: La Découverte. ________. 2012. “Is Finance Responsible for the Rise in Wage Inequality in France?” Socio-Economic Review 10/3: 447–470. ________. 2013.


Analysis of Financial Time Series by Ruey S. Tsay

Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, discrete time, financial engineering, frictionless, frictionless market, implied volatility, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Long Term Capital Management, market microstructure, martingale, p-value, pattern recognition, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, telemarketer, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve

Tsay Copyright  2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 0-471-41544-8 CHAPTER 5 High-Frequency Data Analysis and Market Microstructure High-frequency data are observations taken at fine time intervals. In finance, they often mean observations taken daily or at a finer time scale. These data have become available primarily due to advances in data acquisition and processing techniques, and they have attracted much attention because they are important in empirical study of market microstructure. The ultimate high-frequency data in finance are the transaction-by-transaction or trade-by-trade data in security markets.

Nonlinear Models and Their Applications 126 4.1 Nonlinear Models, 128 4.2 Nonlinearity Tests, 152 4.3 Modeling, 161 4.4 Forecasting, 161 4.5 Application, 164 Appendix A. Some RATS Programs for Nonlinear Volatility Models, 168 Appendix B. S-Plus Commands for Neural Network, 169 5. High-Frequency Data Analysis and Market Microstructure 175 5.1 Nonsynchronous Trading, 176 5.2 Bid-Ask Spread, 179 5.3 Empirical Characteristics of Transactions Data, 181 5.4 Models for Price Changes, 187 5.5 Duration Models, 194 5.6 Nonlinear Duration Models, 206 5.7 Bivariate Models for Price Change and Duration, 207 Appendix A. Review of Some Probability Distributions, 212 Appendix B.

In Chapter 4, we address nonlinearity in financial time series, introduce test statistics that can discriminate nonlinear series from linear ones, and discuss several nonlinear models. The chapter also introduces nonparametric estimation methods and neural networks and shows various applications of nonlinear models in finance. Chapter 5 is concerned with analysis of high-frequency financial data and its application to market microstructure. It shows that nonsynchronous trading and bid-ask bounce can introduce serial correlations in a stock return. It also studies the dynamic of time duration between trades and some econometric models for analyzing transactions data. In Chapter 6, we introduce continuous-time diffusion models and Ito’s lemma.


How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, global macro, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Ivan Sutherland, John Bogle, John von Neumann, junk bonds, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, subscription business, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional

Being the newbie that I was, I had no idea that Evan was “the father of program trading.”9 He had done the first package trade at Keystone and later moved to Batterymarch, where those early trades involved running across town with decks of punched cards. The athletic aspect to Evan’s electronic trading continued long past the time it was needed for data communications. Few others have been observed doing cartwheels in trading rooms. In between gymnastic events, Evan taught me a great deal about market microstructure, and the incentives of the various participants in the markets. His pioneering work in creating electronic markets, by direct computer links to brokers before the exchanges had moved beyond telephones, presaged much of the complexity of current network of electronic markets, while illuminating the critical relationships and incentives.

Prices are determined by agents acting in their singular self-interest. The only way anyone knows a fair, equilibrium price has been established is for prices to overreact in both directions. I have set out to profit by making this process more efficient. In the two areas I really know anything about, options pricing and market microstructure, I read virtually every book and article published on those subjects and then find things to exploit that are not written about. Lastly, no model or mathematical insight can make money on its own. One needs a team that collectively understands every aspect of running a trading business. Becoming a quant is not an individual sport.

Prior to joining Cooper Neff, Mr. Sterge was employed by CoreStates Financial Corporation where he was assistant vice president, trading interest rate options from September 1986 to November 1989. In 1991, Mr. Sterge founded a new variety of short term equity trading based on models of stock market microstructure, or how stocks’ bids and offers evolve over time and in response to order flow and other information. Called Active Portfolio Strategies, this business flourished following the acquisition of Cooper Neff by Banque Nationale de Paris (now BNP Paribas) in 1995. Effectively, an internal hedge fund strategy, Active Portfolio Strategies at times managed well over $20 billion in global equity positions for BNP Paribas.


pages: 320 words: 33,385

Market Risk Analysis, Quantitative Methods in Finance by Carol Alexander

asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate swap, low interest rates, market friction, market microstructure, p-value, performance metric, power law, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic bias, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-sum game

More generally, a considerable body of financial econometrics research has focused on discrete time models for the theory of asset pricing which depends on the assumptions of no arbitrage, single agent optimality and market equilibrium. Indeed, two out of five of the volumes of classic research papers in financial econometrics collected by Lo (2007) are devoted to this issue. I.4.6.2 Analysing Empirical Market Behaviour Market microstructure is the study of price formation and how this is related to trading protocols and trading volume. It is the study of market liquidity, of how prices are formed, of the times between trades and of the determinants of the bid–ask spread. A good survey of research papers in this field is given by Biais et al. (2005).

Bernoulli, D. (1738) Specimen theoria novae de mensura sortis. Commentarii Academiae Scientarum Imperialis Petropolitnae 5(2), 175–192. Translated into English by L. Sommer (1954): Exposition of a new theory on the measurement of risk, Econometrica, 22, 23–26. Biais, B.R., Glosten, L. and Spatt, C. (2005) Market microstructure: A survey of micro-foundations, empirical results, and policy implications. Journal of Financial Markets 8, 217–264. Bilmes, J.A. (1998) A gentle tutorial of the EM algorithm and its application to parameter estimation for Gaussian mixture and hidden Markov models. http://crow.ee.washington.edu/people/bulyko/papers/ em.pdf (accessed October 2007).

(independent and identically distributed) variables central limit theorem 121 error process 148 financial modelling 186 GEV distribution 101 regression 148, 157, 175 stable distribution 106 stochastic process 134–5 Implicit function 185 Implied volatility 194, 196, 200–1 Implied volatility surface 200–1 Incremental change 31 Indefinite integral 15 Independent events 74 Independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) variables central limit theorem 121 error process 148 financial modelling 186 GEV distribution 101 regression 148, 157, 175 stable distribution 106 stochastic process 134–5 284 Index Independent variable 72, 143 random 109–10, 115, 140 Index tracking regression model 182–3 Indicator function 6 Indices, laws 8 Indifference curves 248–9 Inequality constraint, minimum variance portfolio 245–6 Inference 72, 118–29, 141 central limit theorem 120–1 confidence intervals 72, 118–24 critical values 118–20, 122–3, 129 hypothesis tests 124–5 means 125–7 non-parametric tests 127–9 quantiles 118–20 variance 126–7 Inflexion points 14, 35 Information matrix 133, 203 Information ratio 257, 259 Instability, finite difference approximation 209–10 Integrated process, discrete time 134–6 Integration 3, 15–16, 35 Intensity, Poisson distribution 88 Interest rate 34, 171–3 Interest rate sensitivity 34 Interpolation 186, 193–200, 223 cubic spline 197–200 currency option 195–7 linear/bilinear 193–5 polynomial 195–7 Intrinsic value of option 215 Inverse function 6–7, 35 Inverse matrix 41, 43–4, 133 Investment bank 225 Investment 2, 256–7 Investor risk tolerance 230–1, 237 Irrational numbers 7 Isoquants 248 Iteration 186–93, 223 bisection method 187–8 gradient method 191–3 Newton–Raphson method 188–91 Itô’s lemma 138–9, 219 iTraxx Europe credit spread index 172 Jacobian matrix 202 Jarque–Bera normality test Jensen’s alpha 257–8 158 Joint density function 114–15 Joint distribution function 114–15 Joint probability 73 Jumps, Poisson process 139 Kappa indices 263–5 Kernel 106–7 Kolmogorov–Smirnoff test 128 Kuhn–Tucker conditions 30 Kurtosis 81–3, 94–6, 205–6 Lagrange multiplier (LM) test 124, 167 Lagrange multiplier 29–30, 244 Lagrangian function 29–30 Lattice 186, 210–16, 223 Laws of indices 8 Least squares OLS estimation 143–4, 146–50, 153–61, 163, 170–1, 176 problems 201–2 weighted 179 Leptokurtic density 82–3 Levenberg–Marquardt algorithm 202 Lévy distribution 105 Likelihood function 72, 130–31 MLE 72, 130–34, 141, 202–3 optimization 202–3 ratio test 124, 167 Linear function 4–5 Linear interpolation 193–5 Linear portfolios 33, 35 correlation matrix 55–60 covariance matrix 55–61 matrix algebra 55–61 P&L 57–8 returns 25, 56–8 volatility 57–8 Linear regression 143–84 Linear restrictions, hypothesis tests 165–6 Linear transformation 48 Linear utility function 233 LM (Lagrange multiplier) 29–30, 124, 167, 244 Local maxima 14, 28–9 Local minima 14, 28–9 Logarithmic utility function 232 Logarithm, natural 1, 9, 34–5 Log likelihood 131–2 Lognormal distribution 93–4, 213–14, 218–20 Log returns 16, 19–25 Index Long portfolio 3, 17, 238–40 Long-short portfolio 17, 20–1 Low discrepancy sequences 217 Lower triangular square matrix 62, 64 LR (likelihood ratio) test 124, 167 LU decomposition, matrix 63–4 Marginal densities 108–9 Marginal distributions 108–9 Marginal probability 73–4 Marginal utility 229–30 Market behaviour 180–1 Market beta 250 Market equilibrium 252 Market maker 2 Market microstructure 180 Market portfolio 250–1 Market risk premium, CAPM 253 Markets complete 212 regime-specific behaviour 96–7 Markowitz, Harry 226, 238, 266 Markowitz problem 200–1, 226, 244–5 Matrix algebra 37–70 application 38–47 decomposition 61–4, 70 definite matrix 37, 46–7, 54, 58–9, 70 determinant 41–3, 47 eigenvalues/vectors 37–8, 48–54, 59–61, 70 functions of several variables 27–31 general linear model 161–2 hypothesis testing 165–6 invariant 62 inverse 41, 43–4 law 39–40 linear portfolio 55–61 OLS estimation 159–61 PCA 64–70 product 39–40 quadratic form 37, 45–6, 54 regression 159–61, 165–6 simultaneous equation 44–5 singular matrix 40–1 terminology 38–9 Maxima 14, 28–31, 35 Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) 72, 130–4, 141, 202–3 Mean confidence interval 123 Mean excess loss 104 Mean reverting process 136–7 Mean 78–9, 125–6, 127, 133–4 285 Mean square error 201 Mean–variance analysis 238 Mean–variance criterion, utility theory 234–7 Minima 14, 28–31, 35 Minimum variance portfolio 3, 240–7 Mixture distribution 94–7, 116–17, 203–6 MLE (maximum likelihood estimation) 72, 130–4, 141, 202–3 Modified duration 2 Modified Newton method 192–3 Moments probability distribution 78–83, 140 sample 82–3 Sharpe ratio 260–3 Monotonic function 13–14, 35 Monte Carlo simulation 129, 217–22 correlated simulation 220–2 empirical distribution 217–18 random numbers 217 time series of asset prices 218–20 Multicollinearity 170–3, 184 Multiple restrictions, hypothesis testing 166–7 Multivariate distributions 107–18, 140–1 bivariate 108–9, 116–17 bivariate normal mixture 116–17 continuous 114 correlation 111–14 covariance 110–2 independent random variables 109–10, 114 normal 115–17, 220–2 Student t 117–18 Multivariate linear regression 158–75 BHP Billiton Ltd 162–5, 169–70, 174–5 confidence interval 167–70 general linear model 161–2 hypothesis testing 163–6 matrix notation 159–61 multicollinearity 170–3, 184 multiple regression in Excel 163–4 OLS estimation 159–61 orthogonal regression 173–5 prediction 169–70 simple linear model 159–61 Multivariate Taylor expansion 34 Mutually exclusive events 73 Natural logarithm 9, 34–5 Natural spline 198 Negative definite matrix 46–7, 54 Newey–West standard error 176 286 Index Newton–Raphson iteration 188–91 Newton’s method 192 No arbitrage 2, 179–80, 211–12 Non-linear function 1–2 Non-linear hypothesis 167 Non-linear portfolio 33, 35 Non-parametric test 127–9 Normal confidence interval 119–20 Normal distribution 90–2 Jarque–Bera test 158 log likelihood 131–2 mixtures 94–7, 140–1, 203–6 multivariate 115–16, 220–2 standard 218–19 Normalized eigenvector 51–3 Normalized Student t distribution 99 Normal mixture distribution 94–7, 116–17, 140–1 EM algorithm 203–6 kurtosis 95–6 probabilities of variable 96–7 variance 94–6 Null hypothesis 124 Numerical methods 185–223 binomial lattice 210–6 inter/extrapolation 193–200 iteration 186–93 Objective function 29, 188 Offer price 2 Oil index, Amex 162–3, 169–70, 174 OLS (ordinary least squares) estimation 143–4, 146–50 autocorrelation 176 BHP Billiton Ltd case study 163 heteroscedasticity 176 matrix notation 159–61 multicollinearity 170–1 properties of estimator 155–8 regression in Excel 153–5 Omega statistic 263–5 One-sided confidence interval 119–20 Opportunity set 246–7, 251 Optimization 29–31, 200–6, 223 EM algorithm 203–6 least squares problems 201–2 likelihood methods 202–3 numerical methods 200–5 portfolio allocation 3, 181 Options 1–2 American 1, 215–16 Bermudan 1 call 1, 6 currency 195–7 European 1–2, 195–6, 212–13, 215–16 finite difference approximation 206–10 pay-off 6 plain vanilla 2 put 1 Ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation 143–4, 146–50 autocorrelation 176 BHP Billiton Ltd case study 163 heteroscedasticity 176 matrix notation 159–61 multicollinearity 170–1 properties of estimators 155–8 regression in Excel 153–5 Orthogonal matrix 53–4 Orthogonal regression 173–5 Orthogonal vector 39 Orthonormal matrix 53 Orthonormal vector 53 Out-of-sample testing 183 P&L (profit and loss) 3, 19 backtesting 183 continuous time 19 discrete time 19 financial returns 16, 19 volatility 57–8 Pairs trading 183 Parabola 4 Parameter notation 79–80 Pareto distribution 101, 103–5 Parsimonious regression model 153 Partial derivative 27–8, 35 Partial differential equation 2, 208–10 Pay-off, option 6 PCA (principal component analysis) 38, 64–70 definition 65–6 European equity indices 67–9 multicollinearity 171 representation 66–7 Peaks-over-threshold model 103–4 Percentage returns 16, 19–20, 58 Percentile 83–5, 195 Performance measures, RAPMs 256–65 Period log returns 23–5 Pi 7 Index Piecewise polynomial interpolation 197 Plain vanilla option 2 Points of inflexion 14, 35 Poisson distribution 87–9 Poisson process 88, 139 Polynomial interpolation 195–7 Population mean 123 Portfolio allocation 237–49, 266 diversification 238–40 efficient frontier 246–9, 251 Markowitz problem 244–5 minimum variance portfolio 240–7 optimal allocation 3, 181, 247–9 Portfolio holdings 17–18, 25–6 Portfolio mathematics 225–67 asset pricing theory 250–55 portfolio allocation 237–49, 266 RAPMs 256–67 utility theory 226–37, 266 Portfolios bond portfolio 37 delta-hedged 208 linear 25, 33, 35, 55–61 minimum variance 3, 240–7 non-linear 33, 35 rebalancing 17–18, 26, 248–9 returns 17–18, 20–1, 91–2 risk factors 33 risk free 211–12 stock portfolio 37 Portfolio volatility 3 Portfolio weights 3, 17, 25–6 Positive definite matrices 37, 46–7, 70 correlation matrix 58–9 covariance matrix 58–9 eigenvalues/vectors 54 stationary point 28–9 Posterior probability 74 Post-sample prediction 183 Power series expansion 9 Power utility functions 232–3 Prediction 169–70, 183 Price discovery 180 Prices ask price 2 asset price evolution 87 bid price 2 equity 172 generating time series 218–20 lognormal asset prices 213–14 market microstructure 180 offer price 2 stochastic process 137–9 Pricing arbitrage pricing theory 257 asset pricing theory 179–80, 250–55 European option 212–13 no arbitrage 211–13 Principal cofactors, determinants 41 Principal component analysis (PCA) 38, 64–70 definition 65–6 European equity index 67–9 multicollinearity 171 representation 66–7 Principal minors, determinants 41 Principle of portfolio diversification 240 Prior probability 74 Probability and statistics 71–141 basic concepts 72–85 inference 118–29 laws of probability 73–5 MLE 130–4 multivariate distributions 107–18 stochastic processes 134–9 univariate distribution 85–107 Profit and loss (P&L) 3, 19 backtesting 183 continuous time 19 discrete time 19 financial returns 16, 19 volatility 57–8 Prompt futures 194 Pseudo-random numbers 217 Put option 1, 212–13, 215–16 Quadratic convergence 188–9, 192 Quadratic form 37, 45–6, 54 Quadratic function 4–5, 233 Quantiles 83–5, 118–20, 195 Quartiles 83–5 Quasi-random numbers 217 Random numbers 89, 217 Random variables 71 density/distribution function 75 i.i.d. 101, 106, 121, 135, 148, 157, 175 independent 109–10, 116, 140–1 OLS estimators 155 sampling 79–80 Random walks 134–7 Ranking investments 256 287 288 Index RAPMs (risk adjusted performance measures) 256–67 CAPM 257–8 kappa indices 263–5 omega statistic 263–5 Sharpe ratio 250–1, 252, 257–63, 267 Sortino ratio 263–5 Realization, random variable 75 Realized variance 182 Rebalancing of portfolio 17–18, 26, 248–9 Recombining tree 210 Regime-specific market behaviour 96–7, 117 Regression 143–84 autocorrelation 175–9, 184 financial applications 179–83 heteroscedasticity 175–9, 184 linear 143–84 multivariate linear 158–75 OLS estimator properties 155–8 simple linear model 144–55 Relative frequency 77–8 Relative risk tolerance 231 Representation, PCA 66–7 Residuals 145–6, 157, 175–8 Residual sum of squares (RSS) 146, 148–50, 159–62 Resolution techniques 185–6 Restrictions, hypothesis testing 165–7 Returns 2–3, 16–26 absolute 58 active 92, 256 CAPM 253–4 compounding 22–3 continuous time 16–17 correlated simulations 220 discrete time 16–17, 22–5 equity index 96–7 geometric Brownian motion 21–2 linear portfolio 25, 56–8 log returns 16, 19–25 long-short portfolio 20–1 multivariate normal distribution 115–16 normal probability 91–2 P&L 19 percentage 16, 19–20, 59–61 period log 23–5 portfolio holdings/weights 17–18 risk free 2 sources 25–6 stochastic process 137–9 Ridge estimator, OLS 171 Risk active risk 256 diversifiable risk 181 portfolio 56–7 systematic risk 181, 250, 252 Risk adjusted performance measure (RAPM) 256–67 CAPM 257–8, 266 kappa indices 263–5 omega statistic 263–5 Sharpe ratio 251, 252, 257–63, 267 Sortino ratio 263–5 Risk averse investor 248 Risk aversion coefficients 231–4, 237 Risk factor sensitivities 33 Risk free investment 2 Risk free portfolio 211 Risk free returns 2 Risk loving investors 248–9 Risk neutral valuation 211–12 Risk preference 229–30 Risk reversal 195–7 Risk tolerance 230–1, 237 Robustness 171 Roots 3–9, 187 RSS (residual sum of squares) 146, 148–50, 159–62 S&P 100 index 242–4 S&P 500 index 204–5 Saddle point 14, 28 Sample 76–8, 82–3 Sampling distribution 140 Sampling random variable 79–80 Scalar product 39 Scaling law 106 Scatter plot 112–13, 144–5 SDE (stochastic differential equation) 136 Security market line (SML) 253–4 Self-financing portfolio 18 Sensitivities 1–2, 33–4 Sharpe ratio 257–63, 267 autocorrelation adjusted 259–62 CML 251, 252 generalized 262–3 higher moment adjusted 260–2 making decision 258 stochastic dominance 258–9 Sharpe, William 250 Short portfolio 3, 17 22, 134, Index Short sales 245–7 Short-term hedging 182 Significance level 124 Similarity transform 62 Similar matrices 62 Simple linear regression 144–55 ANOVA and goodness of fit 149–50 error process 148–9 Excel OLS estimation 153–5 hypothesis tests 151–2 matrix notation 159–61 OLS estimation 146–50 reporting estimated model 152–3 Simulation 186, 217–22 Simultaneous equations 44–5 Singular matrix 40–1 Skewness 81–3, 205–6 Smile fitting 196–7 SML (security market line) 253–4 Solver, Excel 186, 190–1, 246 Sortino ratio 263–5 Spectral decomposition 60–1, 70 Spline interpolation 197–200 Square matrix 38, 40–2, 61–4 Square-root-of-time scaling rule 106 Stable distribution 105–6 Standard deviation 80, 121 Standard error 80, 169 central limit theorem 121 mean/variance 133–4 regression 148–9 White’s robust 176 Standard error of the prediction 169 Standardized Student t distribution 99–100 Standard normal distribution 90, 218–19 Standard normal transformation 90 Standard uniform distribution 89 Stationary point 14–15, 28–31, 35 Stationary stochastic process 111–12, 134–6 Stationary time series 64–5 Statistical arbitrage strategy 182–3 Statistical bootstrap 218 Statistics and probability 71–141 basic concepts 72–85 inference 118–29 law of probability 73–5 MLE 130–4 multivariate distribution 107–18 stochastic process 134–9 univariate distribution 85–107 Step length 192 Stochastic differential equation (SDE) 22, 134, 136 Stochastic dominance 227, 258–9 Stochastic process 72, 134–9, 141 asset price/returns 137–9 integrated 134–6 mean reverting 136–7 Poisson process 139 random walks 136–7 stationary 111–12, 134–6 Stock portfolio 37 Straddle 195–6 Strangle 195–7 Strictly monotonic function 13–14, 35 Strict stochastic dominance 258 Structural break 175 Student t distribution 97–100, 140 confidence intervals 122–3 critical values 122–3 equality of means/variances 127 MLE 132 multivariate 117–18 regression 151–3, 165, 167–8 simulation 220–2 Sum of squared residual, OLS 146 Symmetric matrix 38, 47, 52–4, 61 Systematic risk 181, 250, 252 Tail index 102, 104 Taylor expansion 2–3, 31–4, 36 applications 33–4 approximation 31–4, 36 definition 32–3 multivariate 34 risk factor sensitivities 33 Theory of asset pricing 179–80, 250–55 Tic-by-tic data 180 Time series asset prices/returns 137–9, 218–20 lognormal asset prices 218–20 PCA 64–5 Poisson process 88 regression 144 stochastic process 134–9 Tobin’s separation theorem 250 Tolerance levels, iteration 188 Tolerance of risk 230–1, 237 Total derivative 31 Total sum of square (TSS) 149, 159–62 289 290 Index Total variation, PCA 66 Tower law for expectations 79 Traces of matrix 62 Tradable asset 1 Trading, regression model 182–3 Transition probability 211–13 Transitive preferences 226 Transposes of matrix 38 Trees 186, 209–11 Treynor ratio 257, 259 TSS (total sum of squares) 149, 159–62 Two-sided confidence interval 119–21 Unbiased estimation 79, 81, 156–7 Uncertainty 71 Unconstrained optimization 29 Undiversifiable risk 252 Uniform distribution 89 Unit matrix 40–1 Unit vector 46 Univariate distribution 85–107, 140 binomial 85–7, 212–13 exponential 87–9 generalized Pareto 101, 103–5 GEV 101–3 kernel 106–7 lognormal 93–4, 213–14, 218–20 normal 90–7, 115–16, 131–2, 140, 157–8, 203–6, 217–22 normal mixture 94–7, 140, 203–6 Poisson 87–9 sampling 100–1 stable 105–6 Student t 97–100, 122–3, 126, 132–3, 140–1, 151–3, 165–8, 220–2 uniform 89 Upper triangular square matrix 62, 64 Utility theory 226–37, 266 mean–variance criterion 234–7 properties 226–9 risk aversion coefficient 231–4, 237 risk preference 229–30 risk tolerance 230–1, 237 Value at risk (VaR) 104–6, 185, 194 Vanna–volga interpolation method 196 Variance ANOVA 143–4, 149–50, 154, 159–60, 164–5 confidence interval 123–4 forecasting 182 minimum variance portfolio 3, 240–7 mixture distribution 94–6 MLE 133 normal mixture distribution 95–6 portfolio volatility 3 probability distribution 79–81 realized 182 tests on variance 126–7 utility theory 234–7 VaR (value at risk) 104–6, 185, 194 Vector notation, functions of several variables 28 Vectors 28, 37–9, 48–54, 59–61, 70 Venn diagram 74–5 Volatility equity 3, 172–3 implied volatility 194, 196–7, 200–1 interpolation 194, 196–7 linear portfolio 57–8 long-only portfolio 238–40 minimum variance portfolio 240–4 portfolio variance 3 Volpi, Leonardo 70 Vstoxx index 172 Waiting time, Poisson process 88–9 Wald test 124, 167 Weakly stationary process 135 Weak stochastic dominance 258–9 Weibull distribution 103 Weighted least squares 179 Weights, portfolio 3, 17, 25–6 White’s heteroscedasticity test 177–8 White’s robust standard errors 176 Wiener process 22, 136 Yield 1, 197–200 Zero matrix 39 Z test 126


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Mathematics of the Financial Markets: Financial Instruments and Derivatives Modelling, Valuation and Risk Issues by Alain Ruttiens

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, financial engineering, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market microstructure, martingale, p-value, passive investing, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Satyajit Das, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, time value of money, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

For a time sub-interval of width h, a realized volatility can be modeled by starting from the following relationship, assuming a continuous sample path over h: Clearly, going further would exceed the framework of this book.10 Entering into such time sub-intervals is relevant to the broader field of market microstructure, which studies how successive market prices (called tick data) are actually affected by the successive trading orders. Market microstructure represents one of the most ambitious and sophisticated research areas in the field of modeling of the financial markets. 12.4 MODELING THE CORRELATION It makes sense to also deal in this chapter with correlation modeling.

Figure 15.5 Diagram of a neural network performing a multi-linear regression The major problem with the application of NNs to forecast financial time series is that, as has already appeared in previous sections, financial time series are all but stable in their behavior over time. Hence the revival of this technique, aiming at applying it short term as a tool for market microstructure analysis.7 15.2 POTENTIAL TROUBLES WITH DERIVATIVES VALUATION It's puzzling why bankers have come up with these new ways to lose money when the old ways were working so well. John STUMPF, CEO Wells Fargo8 Throughout this book, we have presented the main quantitative methods to value financial instruments, and outlined some more sophisticated ones, that represent the unceasing research to improve them.


pages: 467 words: 154,960

Trend Following: How Great Traders Make Millions in Up or Down Markets by Michael W. Covel

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, correlation coefficient, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fiat currency, fixed income, Future Shock, game design, global macro, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, money market fund, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Leeson, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, survivorship bias, systematic trading, Teledyne, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, William of Occam, zero-sum game

Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 8. David Greising, How Managed Funds Managed to Do So Poorly. Business Week, No. 3294 (November 23, 1992), 112. 9. Daniel P. Collins, The Return of Long-Term Trend Following. Futures, Vol. 32, No. 4 (March 2003), 68–73. 10. Desmond McRae, Top Traders. Managed Derivatives (May 1996). 11. Trend Following: Performance, Risk and Correlation Characteristics. White Paper, Graham Capital Management. 12. Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 13.

Ginger Szala, Tom Shanks: Former “Turtle” Winning Race the Hard Way. Futures, Vol. 20, No. 2 (January 15, 1991), 78. 29. Carla Cavaletti, Turtles on the Move. Futures, Vol. 27 (June 1998), 79. 30. Laurie Kaplan, Turning Turtles into Traders. Managed Derivatives (May 1996). 31. Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 32. Larry Harris, The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity. Draft 0.911, May 7, 1993. 33. Larry Harris, The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity.

Active Trader (July 2000). 6. Mark Rzepczynski, Portfolio Diversification: Investors Just Don’t Seem to Have Enough. JWH Journal. 7. Jack Reerink, The Power of Leverage. Futures, Vol. 24, No. 4 (April 1995). 8. Edward O. Thorp, The Mathematics of Gambling. Hollywood, CA, 1984. 9. Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 10. Going Once, Going Twice. Discover (August 2002), 23. 11. Jim Little, Sol Waksman, A Perspective on Risk. Barclay Managed Futures Report. 12. Craig Pauley, How to Become a CTA. Based on Chicago Mercantile Exchange Seminars, 1992–1994.


pages: 402 words: 110,972

Nerds on Wall Street: Math, Machines and Wired Markets by David J. Leinweber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, asset allocation, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, butter production in bangladesh, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Danny Hillis, demand response, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, fake news, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Gordon Gekko, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, information retrieval, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jim Simons, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, load shedding, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, market fragmentation, market microstructure, Mars Rover, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, negative equity, Network effects, optical character recognition, paper trading, passive investing, pez dispenser, phenotype, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, semantic web, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, smart grid, smart meter, social web, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Turing machine, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, value engineering, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, yield curve, Yogi Berra, your tax dollars at work

Being the newbie that I was, I had no idea that Evan was “the father of program trading.”14 He had done the first package trade, at Keystone, and later moved to Batterymarch, where those early trades involved running across town with decks of punched cards. The athletic aspect to Evan’s electronic trading continued long past the time it was needed for data communications. Few others have been observed doing cartwheels in trading rooms. In between gymnastic events, Evan taught me a great deal about market microstructure, and the incentives of the various participants in the markets. His pioneering work in creating electronic markets, by direct computer links to brokers before the exchanges had moved beyond telephones, presaged much of the complexity of the current network of electronic markets, while illuminating the critical relationships and incentives.

People set up jumbo magnifying lens devices to project them onto walls. Back then, people traded faster than the machines could keep up with, so delay meters were installed on the floor. Delay indicators are still found on modern electronic feeds. People saved tapes and studied them. You could say they were the first high-frequency market microstructure studies. Here’s a fellow doing just that. This looks like my office, but neater—a foreshock of the information explosion we have today. 20 Nerds on Wall Str eet On the floor, there were “human Quotrons” who used to pick up the most recent end of tape and follow it back in time to find the latest price quotes for specific stocks.

He apparently realized that, despite his instincts as a former academic, some things are more valuable unpublished. Subsequent in-house developments made D.E. Shaw a leader (reportedly) in electronic market making, statistical arbitrage, and other fast electronic trading strategies. David Whitcomb, a market microstructure economist at Rutgers University and coauthor of a 1988 book on electronic trading strategies,8 faced the same sort of skepticism selling his ideas to Wall Street. Finding no institutional backing, he joined forces with a computer scientist colleague to found Automated Trading Desk (ATD) in the proverbial garage in Charleston, South Carolina.


pages: 293 words: 88,490

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction by Richard Bookstaber

asset allocation, bank run, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, data science, disintermediation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, epigenetics, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, geopolitical risk, Henri Poincaré, impact investing, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market microstructure, money market fund, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, sovereign wealth fund, the map is not the territory, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, yield curve

New York: Perennial. Kyle, Albert S. 1985. “Continuous Auctions and Insider Trading.” Econometrica 53, no. 6: 1315–35. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1913210. Kyle, Albert S., and Anna A. Obizhaeva. 2011a. “Market Microstructure Invariants: Empirical Evidence from Portfolio Transitions.” Social Science Research Network, December 12. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1978943. ———. 2011b. “Market Microstructure Invariants: Theory and Implications of Calibration.” Social Science Research Network, December 12. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.1978932. Kyle, Albert S., and Wei Xiong. 2001. “Contagion as a Wealth Effect.” Journal of Finance 56, no. 4: 1401–40. doi: 10.1111/0022-1082.00373.


Alpha Trader by Brent Donnelly

Abraham Wald, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, Checklist Manifesto, commodity trading advisor, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, deep learning, diversification, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, endowment effect, eurozone crisis, fail fast, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, global macro, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, high net worth, hindsight bias, implied volatility, impulse control, Inbox Zero, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, law of one price, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, McMansion, Monty Hall problem, Network effects, nowcasting, PalmPilot, paper trading, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, prediction markets, price anchoring, price discovery process, price stability, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, very high income, yield curve, you are the product, zero-sum game

Then you are smarter, more knowledgeable and more nimble than the competition and built to survive in the long run. Part Three is a study of the specific methodologies and mathematics you need to understand to achieve these goals. Let’s go to Chapter 8, where we will go into some depth on a topic I have always found supremely fascinating: market microstructure. 99. Leung, Woon Sau and Wong, Gabriel and Wong, Woon K., “Social-Media Sentiment, Portfolio Complexity, and Stock Returns” (2019). 100. A Macro Tourist is a trader or investor who takes a position in a market they don’t know very well, in an attempt to profit from a popular narrative. The appearance of macro tourists often makes the locals want to run for the hills.

If your products are deep and your volume is easily absorbed, life is good. If not, be thoughtful and strategic about what time of day you execute, and partner with a market maker you trust. This concludes our discussion of liquidity and how activity varies by time of day. The last facet of market microstructure we will cover is volatility. First row of x-axis label is GMT, second row is NYC time 4. Volatility The next step in understanding how your market moves is to understand your product’s volatility. Market professionals often call volatility “vol”. Vol is a critical part of a market’s microstructure.

A solid understanding of microstructure will improve your executions, increase the payout on your good ideas and reduce the cost of your bad ones. Even if you are confident in your knowledge of your market’s microstructure, be on the lookout for changes and stay abreast of developments that might change how your market behaves. Simple changes to market microstructure can often lead to significant changes in your P&L and can turn profitable strategies into duds. Now, let’s move to the next step. In Chapter 9, I will tell you how I stay in touch with the narrative, and how that helps me forecast future moves and come up with trade ideas. 101. If you are a huge Elon Musk fan or if you really can’t stand him for some reason, don’t trade TSLA.


pages: 369 words: 128,349

Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing by Vijay Singal

3Com Palm IPO, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, book value, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information security, junk bonds, liberal capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, prediction markets, price stability, profit motive, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, survivorship bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, transaction costs, uptick rule, Vanguard fund

Sarig Value Based Management: The Corporate Response to Shareholder Revolution John D. Martin and J. William Petty Debt Management: A Practitioner’s Guide John D. Finnerty and Douglas R. Emery Real Estate Investment Trusts: Structure, Performance, and Investment Opportunities Su Han Chan, John Erickson, and Ko Wang Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners Larry Harris BEYOND THE RANDOM WALK A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low-Risk Investing VIJAY SINGAL PH.D., CFA 2003 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2003 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

., and Jeff Madura. 2003. What Drives Stock Price Behavior Following Extreme One-Day Returns. Journal of Financial Research 26(1), 129–46. Nofsinger, John R. 2001. The Impact of Public Information on Investors. Journal of Banking and Finance 25, 1139–366. Short-Term Price Drift Park, Jinwoo. 1995. A Market Microstructure Explanation for Predictable Variations in Stock Returns Following Large Price Changes. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis 30, 241–56. Pritamani, Mahesh, and Vijay Singal. 2001. Return Predictability Following Large Price Changes and Information Releases. Journal of Banking and Finance 25(4), 631–56.


pages: 200 words: 54,897

Flash Boys: Not So Fast: An Insider's Perspective on High-Frequency Trading by Peter Kovac

bank run, barriers to entry, bash_history, Bernie Madoff, compensation consultant, computerized markets, computerized trading, Flash crash, housing crisis, index fund, locking in a profit, London Whale, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, payment for order flow, prediction markets, price discovery process, proprietary trading, Sergey Aleynikov, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, transaction costs, zero day

As you’d expect, they are looking out for their own interests, not ours. Conspiracy of Press Releases “The game is now clear to me,” Brad said. “There’s not a press release I don’t understand.” Lewis presents us with a curious standard: if one can understand press releases, it qualifies one as an expert in capital market microstructure. More curious still is the understanding of press releases that is required. Apparently, every press release is a coded message from the high-frequency conspiracy. According to Lewis, NASDAQ’s missive on their August 22, 2013, outage – “what they said was a technical glitch in the SIP” – wasn’t really about a technical glitch in the SIP.


Trend Commandments: Trading for Exceptional Returns by Michael W. Covel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, disinformation, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, full employment, global macro, Jim Simons, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market bubble, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Sharpe ratio, systematic trading, the scientific method, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, tulip mania, upwardly mobile, Y2K, zero-sum game

Mauboussin and Kristen Bartholdson, “Integrating the Outliers: Two Lessons from the St. Petersburg Paradox.” The Consilient Observer. Vol. 2, No. 2, January 28, 2003. 5. “Trend Following: Performance, Risk, and Correlation Characteristics.” White Paper, Graham Capital Management. See http://www.grahamcapital.com. Zero-Sum 1. Larry Harris, Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 2. Larry Harris, “The Winners and Losers of the Zero-Sum Game: The Origins of Trading Profits, Price Efficiency and Market Liquidity.” Draft 0.911, May 7, 1993. 3. Ibid. 4. Dave Druz interview with Covel, 2011. 5. Ibid. 6.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

See “Home Buyers and Sellers Survey Shows Lingering Impact of Tight Credit” (National Association of Realtors, press release, November 13, 2013). 10.Brooks Barnes and Hunter Atkins, “Hollywood’s Old-Time Star Makers Are Swooping In on YouTube’s Party,” New York Times, September 15, 2014; and Katherine Rosman, “Grumpy Cat Has an Agent, and Now a Movie Deal,” Wall Street Journal, May 31, 2013. 11.Noam Cohen, “When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking,” New York Times, March 26, 2009; and Evan Dashevsky, “Who’s Writing Your Favorite Celebrity’s Tweets,” PC World, November 2013. 12.Daniel F. Spulber, Market Microstructure: Intermediaries and the Theory of the Firm (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21. 13.E-mail correspondence with Daniel Spulber, September 28, 2011. See also Daniel F. Spulber, “Should Business Method Inventions Be Patentable?” Journal of Legal Analysis 3, no. 1(2011): 279. 14.Interview with Mike Maples Jr., September 17, 2014. 15.The notion that middlemen accelerate connections might be called the catalyst view of middlemen.


pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

Malcom Gladwell, “The Terrazzo Jungle,” New Yorker, March 15, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/15/the-terrazzo-jungle; M. Jeffery Hardwick, Mall Maker (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 5. Market makers are sometimes known as liquidity providers, and buyers and sellers are sometimes known as liquidity takers. See Larry Harris, Trading & Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002). 6. In the United States, regulation drove the shift to decimalization (tick sizes of one cent). See US Securities and Exchange Commission, “Report to Congress on Decimalization,” July 2012, 4–6, https://www.sec.gov/news/studies/2012/decimalization-072012.pdf. 7.


pages: 1,535 words: 337,071

Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World by David Easley, Jon Kleinberg

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Douglas Hofstadter, Dutch auction, Erdős number, experimental subject, first-price auction, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, information retrieval, John Nash: game theory, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, market clearing, market microstructure, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Pareto efficiency, Paul Erdős, planetary scale, power law, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, search engine result page, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, seminal paper, Simon Singh, slashdot, social contagion, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, ultimatum game, Vannevar Bush, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Journal, 2(2):143–146, 1953. [204] Garrett Hardin. The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859):1243–1248, 1968. [205] Larry Harris. Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. Oxford University Press, 2002. [206] John C. Harsanyi. Game with incomplete information played by “Bayesian” players, I–III. Part I: The basic model. Management Science, 14(3):159–182, November 1967. [207] Joel Hasbrouck. Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics, and Econometrics of Securities Trading. Oxford University Press, 2007. [208] Kjetil K. Haugen. The performance-enhancing drug game.

The discovery of pluralistic ignorance: An ironic lesson. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 22:333–347, 1986. [325] Hubert J. O’Gorman and Stephen L. Garry. Pluralistic ignorance — A replication and extension. Public Opinion Quarterly, 40:449–458, 1976. [326] Maureen O’Hara. Market Microstructure Theory. Wiley, 1998. [327] Steve Olson. Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and our Common Origins. Houghton Mifflin, 2002. [328] J.-P. Onnela, J. Saramaki, J. Hyvonen, G. Szabo, D. Lazer, K. Kaski, J. Kertesz, and A.-L. Barabasi. Structure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks.


pages: 408 words: 85,118

Python for Finance by Yuxing Yan

asset-backed security, book value, business cycle, business intelligence, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, correlation coefficient, data science, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, functional programming, implied volatility, market microstructure, P = NP, p-value, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, risk free rate, Sharpe ratio, tail risk, time value of money, value at risk, volatility smile, zero-sum game

Yan has actively done research with several publications in Journal of Accounting and Finance, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Empirical Finance, Real Estate Review, Pacific Basin Finance Journal, Applied Financial Economics, and Annals of Operations Research. For example, his latest publication, co-authored with Shaojun Zhang, will appear in the Journal of Banking and Finance in 2014. His research areas include investment, market microstructure, and open source finance. He is proficient at several computer languages such as SAS, R, MATLAB, C, and Python. From 2003 to 2010, he worked as a technical director at Wharton Research Data Services (WRDS), where he debugged several hundred computer programs related to research for WRDS users.


Learn Algorithmic Trading by Sebastien Donadio

active measures, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, backtesting, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, buy and hold, buy low sell high, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, Flash crash, Guido van Rossum, latency arbitrage, locking in a profit, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, natural language processing, OpenAI, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, prediction markets, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, transaction costs, type inference, WebSocket, zero-sum game

For the scope of this book, we provide some intuition behind this matching algorithm and provide a hypothetical matching scenario. The underlying intuition between pro-rata matching is that it favors larger orders over smaller orders at the same price and ignores the time at which the orders were entered. This changes the market's microstructure quite a bit, and the participants are favored to enter larger orders to gain priority instead of entering orders as fast as possible: BIDS ASKS Order A: Buy 100 @ 10.00 Order X: Sell 100 @ 11.00 Order B: Buy 200 @ 10.00 Order Y: Sell 200 @ 11.00 Order C: Buy 700 @ 10.00 Order Z: Sell 200 @ 12.00 Order D: Buy 100 @ 9.00 Consider a market state as shown earlier.


pages: 1,082 words: 87,792

Python for Algorithmic Trading: From Idea to Cloud Deployment by Yves Hilpisch

algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, backtesting, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brownian motion, cloud computing, coronavirus, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Guido van Rossum, implied volatility, information retrieval, margin call, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, paper trading, passive investing, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sorting algorithm, systematic trading, transaction costs, value at risk

This chapter introduces vectorization both with NumPy and pandas and applies it to backtest three types of trading strategies: strategies based on simple moving averages, momentum, and mean reversion. The chapter admittedly makes a number of simplifying assumptions, and a rigorous backtesting of trading strategies needs to take into account more factors that determine trading success in practice, such as data issues, selection issues, avoidance of overfitting, or market microstructure elements. However, the major goal of the chapter is to focus on the concept of vectorization and what it can do in algorithmic trading from a technological and implementation point of view. With regard to all concrete examples and results presented, the problems of data snooping, overfitting, and statistical significance need to be considered.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

“A Multistage Model of Bargaining.” Review of Economic Studies 50, 411–426. Sobel, Robert. 1970. The Curbstone Brokers: The Origins of the American Stock Exchange. New York, Macmillan. Spence, A Michael. 1973. “Job Market Signaling.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, 355–374. Spulber, Daniel F. 1996. “Market Microstructure and Intermediation.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, 135–152. Squires, Dale, Kirkley, James, and Tisdell, Clement A. 1995. “Individual Transferable Quotas as a Fisheries Management Tool.” Reviews in Fisheries Science 3, 141–169. Steinbeck, John. 1996. Sweet Thursday. New York, Penguin.


pages: 317 words: 106,130

The New Science of Asset Allocation: Risk Management in a Multi-Asset World by Thomas Schneeweis, Garry B. Crowder, Hossein Kazemi

asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, collateralized debt obligation, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, global macro, high net worth, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, managed futures, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, passive investing, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, search costs, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical model, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, technology bubble, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

“Market Timing Ability and Volatility Implied in Investment Newsletters’ Asset Allocation Recommendations.” Journal of Financial Economics 42, Issue 3 (November 1996): 397–421. Bibliography 281 Grubel, Herbert. “Internationally Diversified Portfolio: Welfare Gains and Capital Flows.” The American Economic Review Vol. 58, No. 5 (December 1968): 1299–1314. Harris, L. Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Hill, J.M., V. Balasubramanian, K. Gregory, and I. Tierens. “Finding Alpha via Covered Index Writing.” Financial Analysts Journal 62, No. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2006): 29–46. Hryshko, D., M.J. Luengo-Prado, and B.E. Sorensen. “Childhood Determinants of Risk Aversion.” www.ssrn.com, 2009.


pages: 364 words: 101,286

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence by Benoit Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, British Empire, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, carbon-based life, discounted cash flows, diversification, double helix, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, electricity market, Elliott wave, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, full employment, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, implied volatility, index fund, informal economy, invisible hand, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market microstructure, Myron Scholes, new economy, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, power law, price mechanism, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, short selling, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, stochastic volatility, transfer pricing, value at risk, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Zoom in on the fast episodes, and they are seen to have sub-clusters of fast and slow sub-intervals—clusters within clusters within clusters. It is a classic multifractal pattern. Its scaling stretches, through every focal length of our mathematical zoom lens, from about two hours to 180 days—an unusually long zone of regularity. At shorter time-intervals, a new pattern emerges: What economists call market “microstructure” starts to kick in. Here, the average price change is up or down by just 0.14 pfennig, only twice the spread of 0.7 pfennig between bid and ask. With such narrow profit opportunities, some traders do not bother changing their quotes instantly, so you would expect the data to look differently.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

The year before, the onetime Island CEO had left his high-paying job at Citadel to launch his own computer-trading outfit in Chicago, Headlands Technologies. Andresen told his audience that top-shelf traders today need to know much more than quant strategies—they also need to have a deep understanding of market microstructure. They need to know the plumbing. Another speaker was Andrei Kirilenko, who’d conducted in-depth research into the Flash Crash for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Kirilenko had discovered that high-speed gunners typically traded in the direction of the price movement of a stock for the first five seconds of a move, then flipped and traded in the opposite direction after ten seconds.


pages: 483 words: 141,836

Red-Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street by Aaron Brown, Eric Kim

Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Asian financial crisis, Atul Gawande, backtesting, Basel III, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, book value, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, carbon tax, central bank independence, Checklist Manifesto, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, disintermediation, distributed generation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, fail fast, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, global macro, illegal immigration, implied volatility, independent contractor, index fund, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, pre–internet, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Bayes, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve

Large, diversified portfolios have also been blamed for investors not providing oversight to their investments, and for feeding bubbles and crashes. The MPT focus on returns measured periodically, mainly monthly, may have led to underappreciation for both long-term economics and short-term market microstructure. Hedge funds are much better than index funds at determining fundamental value, at providing oversight, for operating at a variety of time scales from microseconds to decades, for reining in bubbles, and at rushing in to repair after crashes. Of course, just because hedge funds can do these things it doesn’t follow that all, or even most, hedge funds actually do these things.


pages: 537 words: 144,318

The Invisible Hands: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Bubbles, Crashes, and Real Money by Steven Drobny

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity super cycle, commodity trading advisor, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency peg, debt deflation, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, equity risk premium, family office, fiat currency, fixed income, follow your passion, full employment, George Santayana, global macro, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, index fund, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, inventory management, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, North Sea oil, open economy, peak oil, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price discovery process, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit motive, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical arbitrage, stochastic volatility, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Great Moderation, Thomas Bayes, time value of money, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two and twenty, unbiased observer, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-sum game

Commodity markets now tend to gap more quickly, showing evidence of what I call “single point volatility.” And there is some evidence of a greater prevalence of serial correlation in pricing, so trends are established much more quickly. This doesn’t necessarily mean commodities are riskier, but it is a change in the market microstructure that you have to stay on top of. As a result of spot shortages and outages, is it easier to be long commodities than short? Although none of this could be described as “easy,” each manager may have a different comfort zone, which is a function of how trades are structured, what the asymmetry is, the risk versus reward, etc.


pages: 454 words: 134,482

Money Free and Unfree by George A. Selgin

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disintermediation, Dutch auction, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, large denomination, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market microstructure, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, Network effects, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Y2K

Quarterly Journal of Economics 7 (1): 55–77. ——— (1904) Economic Essays. New York: Macmillan. ——— (1922) The Theory and History of Banking, 4th ed. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Dunne, G. T. (1964) “A Christmas Present for the President.” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Dunne, P. G.; Fleming, M.; and Zholos, A. (2009) “Repo Market Microstructure in Unusual Monetary Policy Conditions.” Working Paper (December 16). Dwyer, G. P. Jr. (1996) “Wildcat Banking, Banking Panics, and Free Banking in the United States.” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Economic Review 81 (1): 1–20. Dwyer, G. P. Jr., and Gilbert, A. R. (1989) “Bank Runs and Private Remedies.”


pages: 819 words: 181,185

Derivatives Markets by David Goldenberg

Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, financial innovation, fudge factor, implied volatility, incomplete markets, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, law of one price, locking in a profit, London Interbank Offered Rate, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, random walk, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Sharpe ratio, short selling, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, time value of money, transaction costs, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Some of the highlights of the text are: 1. an emphasis on the quote mechanism, and understanding where to find and how to read and interpret the data that underlies this field; 2. an early presentation of the hedging role of forward contracts in Chapter 2, with the use of Microsoft Excel charts as visual aids; 3. an early emphasis on FX markets to develop a global perspective, as opposed to the usual stock market focus; 4. separating out forward contract valuation in the no-dividend case from the dividend case, as exemplified in Chapters 3 and 4; 5. recognizing the alternative derivative valuation problems: at initiation, at expiration, and at an intermediate time; 6. an emphasis on market microstructure in Chapter 5 on futures markets, with due attention to the limit order book and Globex; 7. a portfolio approach to hedging with futures contracts in Chapter 6, with a discussion of most of the approaches to hedging, including carrying charge hedging; 8. discussion of difficult to explain, yet important concepts such as storage, the price of storage, and the all-important spreads notion; 9. an extensive Chapter 7 on financial futures contracts, with particular emphasis on Eurodollar spot and futures, since these are the basis for understanding swaps in Chapter 8; 10. a complete discussion of stock index futures in Chapter 8, and their uses in alternative hedging strategies.


pages: 823 words: 220,581

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? by Steve Keen

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, cellular automata, central bank independence, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, collective bargaining, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, iterative process, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market microstructure, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific mainstream, seigniorage, six sigma, South Sea Bubble, stochastic process, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, total factor productivity, tulip mania, wage slave, zero-sum game

Baba (2000) ‘The application of cellular automata and agent models to network externalities in consumers’ theory: a generalization of life game,’ in W. A. Barnett, C. Chiarella, S. Keen, R. Marks and H. Schnabl (eds), Commerce, Complexity and Evolution, New York: Cambridge University Press. O’Hara, M. (1995) Market Microstructure Theory, Cambridge: Blackwell. Ormerod, P. (1997) The Death of Economics, 2nd edn, New York: John Wiley & Sons. Ormerod, P. (2001) Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior, London: Basic Books. Ormerod, P. (2004) ‘Neoclassical economic theory: a special and not a general case,’ in E.


pages: 1,088 words: 228,743

Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bob Litterman, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pension time bomb, performance metric, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, savings glut, search costs, selection bias, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Takeaways from the vast literature on equity momentum • As noted above, past performance dependence across equities includes a multi-month momentum pattern as well as short-term and long-term reversal patterns. On paper, the strongest result is that past month winners tend to strongly underperform past month losers over the subsequent month. This first-month reversal effect is sometimes attributed to market microstructure effects such as bid–ask bounce, or to price overreaction to firm-specific news, but the most compelling explanation is price concession caused by large trades. Liquidity providers facing low trading costs can exploit this pattern. Return reversals are even stronger over shorter horizons (day and week), for less liquid stocks, when using industry-adjusted returns, and amidst high volatility