In this paper we present a novel approach to the determination of fat tails in financial data by studying the information contained in the limit order book. In an order-driven market buyers and sellers may submit limit orders, which are executed when the price touches a pre-specified lower, respectively higher, limit-price. We show that, in equilibrium, the collection of all such orders - the limit order book - implies a volatility smile, similar to observations from option pricing in the Black-Scholes model. We also show how a jump-diffusion process can be explicitly inferred to account for the volatility smile.
We derive a continuous time model for the joint evolution of the mid price and the bid-ask spread from a multiscale analysis of the whole limit order book (LOB) dynamics. We model the LOB as a multiclass queueing system and perform our asymptotic analysis using stylized features observed empirically. We argue that in the asymptotic regime supported by empirical observations the mid price and bid-ask-spread can be described using only certain parameters of the book (not the whole book itself). Our limit process is characterized by reflecting behavior and state-dependent jumps. Our analysis allo…
This paper develops a model of liquidity provision in financial markets by adapting the Madhavan, Richardson, and Roomans (1997) price formation model to realistic order books with quote discretization and liquidity rebates. We postulate that liquidity providers observe a fundamental price which is continuous, efficient, and can assume values outside the interval spanned by the best quotes. We confirm the predictions of our price formation model with extensive empirical tests on large high-frequency datasets of 100 liquid Nasdaq stocks. Finally we use the model to propose an estimator of the f…
We investigate the statistical properties of the EBS order book for the EUR/USD and USD/JPY currency pairs and the impact of a ten-fold tick size reduction on its dynamics. A large fraction of limit orders are still placed right at or halfway between the old allowed prices. This generates price barriers where the best quotes lie for much of the time, which causes the emergence of distinct peaks in the average shape of the book at round distances. Furthermore, we argue that this clustering is mainly due to manual traders who remained set to the old price resolution. Automatic traders easily tak…
The distribution of liquidity within the limit order book is essential for the impact of market orders on the stock price and the emergence of price shocks. Limit orders are characterized by stylized facts: The number of inserted limit orders declines with the price distance from the quotes following a power law and limit order lifetimes and volumes are power law distributed. Strong dependencies among these quantities add to the complexity of limit order books. Here we analyze the limit order book in the dimensions of price, time, limit order lifetime and volume altogether. This allows us to i…
We study the price impact of order book events - limit orders, market orders and cancelations - using the NYSE TAQ data for 50 U.S. stocks. We show that, over short time intervals, price changes are mainly driven by the order flow imbalance, defined as the imbalance between supply and demand at the best bid and ask prices. Our study reveals a linear relation between order flow imbalance and price changes, with a slope inversely proportional to the market depth. These results are shown to be robust to seasonality effects, and stable across time scales and across stocks. We argue that this linea…
We present a general Markovian framework for order book modeling. Through our approach, we aim at providing a tool enabling to get a better understanding of the price formation process and of the link between microscopic and macroscopic features of financial assets. To do so, we propose a new method of order book representation, and decompose the problem of order book modeling into two sub-problems: dynamics of a continuous-time double auction system with a fixed reference price; interactions between the double auction system and the reference price movements. State dependency is included in o…
We examine the correlation of the limit price with the order book, when a limit order comes. We analyzed the Rebuild Order Book of Stock Exchange Electronic Trading Service, which is the centralized order book market of London Stock Exchange. As a result, the limit price is broadly distributed around the best price according to a power-law, and it isn't randomly drawn from the distribution, but has a strong correlation with the size of cumulative unexecuted limit orders on the price. It was also found that the limit price, on the coarse-grained price scale, tends to gather around the price whi…
Price gap, defined as the logarithmic price difference between the first two occupied price levels on the same side of a limit order book (LOB), is a key determinant of market depth, which is one of the dimensions of liquidity. However, the properties of price gaps have not been thoroughly studied due to the less availability of ultrahigh frequency data. In the paper, we rebuild the LOB dynamics based on the order flow data of 26 A-share stocks traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2003. Three key empirical statistical properties of price gaps are investigated. We find that the distribution…
Through the analysis of a dataset of ultra high frequency order book updates, we introduce a model which accommodates the empirical properties of the full order book together with the stylized facts of lower frequency financial data. To do so, we split the time interval of interest into periods in which a well chosen reference price, typically the mid price, remains constant. Within these periods, we view the limit order book as a Markov queuing system. Indeed, we assume that the intensities of the order flows only depend on the current state of the order book. We establish the limiting behavi…
In financial markets, liquidity is not constant over time but exhibits strong seasonal patterns. In this article we consider a limit order book model that allows for time-dependent, deterministic depth and resilience of the book and determine optimal portfolio liquidation strategies. In a first model variant, we propose a trading dependent spread that increases when market orders are matched against the order book. In this model no price manipulation occurs and the optimal strategy is of the wait region - buy region type often encountered in singular control problems. In a second model, we ass…
In this study, we present a simple stochastic order-book model for investors' swarm behaviors seen in the continuous double auction mechanism, which is employed by major global exchanges. Our study shows a characteristic called "fat tail" is seen in the data obtained from our model that incorporates the investors' swarm behaviors. Our model captures two swarm behaviors: one is investors' behavior to follow a trend in the historical price movement, and another is investors' behavior to send orders that contradict a trend in the historical price movement. In order to capture the features of infl…
This paper focuses on an extension of the Limit Order Book (LOB) model with general shape introduced by Alfonsi, Fruth and Schied. Here, the additional feature allows a time-varying LOB depth. We solve the optimal execution problem in this framework for both discrete and continuous time strategies. This gives in particular sufficient conditions to exclude Price Manipulations in the sense of Huberman and Stanzl or Transaction-Triggered Price Manipulations (see Alfonsi, Schied and Slynko). These conditions give interesting qualitative insights on how market makers may create or not price manipul…
We introduce a microscopic model for the dynamics of the order book to study how the lack of liquidity influences price fluctuations. We use the average density of the stored orders (granularity $g$) as a proxy for liquidity. This leads to a Price Impact Surface which depends on both volume $ω$ and $g$. The dependence on the volume (averaged over the granularity) of the Price Impact Surface is found to be a concave power law function $<ϕ(ω,g)>_g\simω^δ$ with $δ\approx 0.59$. Instead the dependence on the granularity is $ϕ(ω,g|ω)\sim g^α$ with $α\approx-1$, showing a divergence of price fluctua…
We empirically study the trading activity in the electronic on-book segment and in the dealership off-book segment of the London Stock Exchange, investigating separately the trading of active market members and of other market participants which are non-members. We find that (i) the volume distribution of off-book transactions has a significantly fatter tail than the one of on-book transactions, (ii) groups of members and non-members can be classified in categories according to their trading profile (iii) there is a strong anticorrelation between the daily inventory variation of a market membe…
We present a measurement of price impact in order-driven markets that does not require averages across executions or scenarios. Given the order book data associated with one single execution of a sell metaorder, we measure its contribution to price decrease during the trade. We do so by modelling the limit order book using state-dependent Hawkes processes, and by defining the price impact profile of the execution as a function of the compensator of a stochastic process in our model. We apply our measurement to a data set from NASDAQ, and we conclude that the clustering of sell child orders has…
We observe the effects of the three different events that cause spread changes in the order book, namely trades, deletions and placement of limit orders. By looking at the frequencies of the relative amounts of price changing events, we discover that deletions of orders open the bid-ask spread of a stock more often than trades do. We see that once the amount of spread changes due to deletions exceeds the amount of the ones due to trades, other observables in the order book change as well. We then look at how these spread changing events affect the prices of stocks, by means of the price respon…
We study the multi-level order-flow imbalance (MLOFI), which is a vector quantity that measures the net flow of buy and sell orders at different price levels in a limit order book (LOB). Using a recent, high-quality data set for 6 liquid stocks on Nasdaq, we fit a simple, linear relationship between MLOFI and the contemporaneous change in mid-price. For all 6 stocks that we study, we find that the out-of-sample goodness-of-fit of the relationship improves with each additional price level that we include in the MLOFI vector. Our results underline how order-flow activity deep into the LOB can in…
We consider a stochastic model for the dynamics of the two-sided limit order book (LOB). Our model is flexible enough to allow for a dependence of the price dynamics on volumes. For the joint dynamics of best bid and ask prices and the standing buy and sell volume densities, we derive a functional limit theorem, which states that our LOB model converges in distribution to a fully coupled SDE-SPDE system when the order arrival rates tend to infinity and the impact of an individual order arrival on the book as well as the tick size tends to zero. The SDE describes the bid/ask price dynamics whil…
While the long-ranged correlation of market orders and their impact on prices has been relatively well studied in the literature, the corresponding studies of limit orders and cancellations are scarce. We provide here an empirical study of the cross-correlation between all these different events, and their respective impact on future price changes. We define and extract from the data the "bare" impact these events would have, if they were to happen in isolation. For large tick stocks, we show that a model where the bare impact of all events is permanent and non-fluctuating is in good agreement…
A limit order book provides information on available limit order prices and their volumes. Based on these quantities, we give an empirical result on the relationship between the bid-ask liquidity balance and trade sign and we show that liquidity balance on best bid/best ask is quite informative for predicting the future market order's direction. Moreover, we define price jump as a sell (buy) market order arrival which is executed at a price which is smaller (larger) than the best bid (best ask) price at the moment just after the precedent market order arrival. Features are then extracted relat…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）
With the proliferation of algorithmic high-frequency trading in financial markets, the Limit Order Book has generated increased research interest. Research is still at an early stage and there is much we do not understand about the dynamics of Limit Order Books. In this paper, we employ a machine learning approach to investigate Limit Order Book features and their potential to predict short term price movements. This is an initial broad-based investigation that results in some novel observations about LOB dynamics and identifies several promising directions for further research. Furthermore, w…
We present a study of price impact in the over-the-counter credit index market, where no limit order book is used. Contracts are traded via dealers, that compete for the orders of clients. Despite this distinct microstructure, we successfully apply the propagator technique to estimate the price impact of individual transactions. Because orders are typically split less than in multilateral markets, impact is observed to be mainly permanent, in line with theoretical expectations. A simple method is presented to correct for errors in our classification of trades between buying and selling. We fin…
The existing literature provides evidence that limit order book data can be used to predict short-term price movements in stock markets. This paper proposes a new neural network architecture for predicting return jump arrivals in equity markets with high-frequency limit order book data. This new architecture, based on Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory with Attention, is introduced to apply time series representation learning with memory and to focus the prediction attention on the most important features to improve performance. The data set consists of order book data on five liquid U.S. st…
We consider a limit order book, where buyers and sellers register to trade a security at specific prices. The largest price buyers on the book are willing to offer is called the market bid price, and the smallest price sellers on the book are willing to accept is called the market ask price. Market ask price is always greater than market bid price, and these prices move upwards and downwards due to new arrivals, market trades, and cancellations. We model these two price processes as "bouncing geometric Brownian motions (GBMs)", which are defined as exponentials of two mutually reflected Browni…
In this paper we introduce two new Hawkes processes, namely, compound and regime-switching compound Hawkes processes, to model the price processes in limit order books. We prove Law of Large Numbers and Functional Central Limit Theorems (FCLT) for both processes. The two FCLTs are applied to limit order books where we use these asymptotic methods to study the link between price volatility and order flow in our two models by using the diffusion limits of these price processes. The volatilities of price changes are expressed in terms of parameters describing the arrival rates and price changes. …
One popular approach to model the limit order books dynamics of the best bid and ask at level-1 is to use the reduced-form diffusion approximations. It is well known that the biggest contributing factor to the price movement is the imbalance of the best bid and ask. We investigate the data of the level-1 limit order books of a basket of stocks and study the numerical evidence of drift, correlation, volatility and their dependence on the imbalance. Based on the numerical discoveries, we develop a nonparametric discrete model for the dynamics of the best bid and ask, which can be approximated by…
We propose and study a simple stochastic model for the dynamics of a limit order book, in which arrivals of market order, limit orders and order cancellations are described in terms of a Markovian queueing system. Through its analytical tractability, the model allows to obtain analytical expressions for various quantities of interest such as the distribution of the duration between price changes, the distribution and autocorrelation of price changes, and the probability of an upward move in the price, {\it conditional} on the state of the order book. We study the diffusion limit of the price p…
We propose a new model for the level I of a Limit Order Book (LOB), which incorporates the information about the standing orders at the opposite side of the book after each price change and the arrivals of new orders within the spread. Our main result gives a diffusion approximation for the mid-price process. To illustrate the applicability of the considered framework, we also propose a feasible method to compute several quantities of interest}, such as the distribution of the time span between price changes and the probability of consecutive price increments conditioned on the current state o…
We investigate whether the bid/ask queue imbalance in a limit order book (LOB) provides significant predictive power for the direction of the next mid-price movement. We consider this question both in the context of a simple binary classifier, which seeks to predict the direction of the next mid-price movement, and a probabilistic classifier, which seeks to predict the probability that the next mid-price movement will be upwards. To implement these classifiers, we fit logistic regressions between the queue imbalance and the direction of the subsequent mid-price movement for each of 10 liquid s…
In financial markets, the order flow, defined as the process assuming value one for buy market orders and minus one for sell market orders, displays a very slowly decaying autocorrelation function. Since orders impact prices, reconciling the persistence of the order flow with market efficiency is a subtle issue. A possible solution is provided by asymmetric liquidity, which states that the impact of a buy or sell order is inversely related to the probability of its occurrence. We empirically find that when the order flow predictability increases in one direction, the liquidity in the opposite …
By studying all the trades and best bids/asks of ultra high frequency snapshots recorded from the order books of a basket of 10 futures assets, we bring qualitative empirical evidence that the impact of a single trade depends on the intertrade time lags. We find that when the trading rate becomes faster, the return variance per trade or the impact, as measured by the price variation in the direction of the trade, strongly increases. We provide evidence that these properties persist at coarser time scales. We also show that the spread value is an increasing function of the activity. This sugges…
Constant price impact functions, much used in financial literature, are shown to give rise to paradoxical outcomes since they do not allow for proper predictability removal: for instance the exploitation of a single large trade whose size and time of execution are known in advance to some insider leaves the arbitrage opportunity unchanged, which allows arbitrage exploitation multiple times. We argue that chain arbitrage exploitation should not exist, which provides an a contrario consistency criterion. Remarkably, all the stocks investigated in Paris Stock Exchange have dynamically consistent …
We develop a new market-making model, from the ground up, which is tailored towards high-frequency trading under a limit order book (LOB), based on the well-known classification of order types in market microstructure. Our flexible framework allows arbitrary order volume, price jump, and bid-ask spread distributions as well as the use of market orders. It also honors the consistency of price movements upon arrivals of different order types. For example, it is apparent that prices should never go down on buy market orders. In addition, it respects the price-time priority of LOB. In contrast to …
Most of the existing literature on optimal trade execution in limit order book models assumes that resilience is positive. But negative resilience also has a natural interpretation, as it models self-exciting behaviour of the price impact, where trading activities of the large investor stimulate other market participants to trade in the same direction. In the paper we discuss several new qualitative effects on optimal trade execution that arise when we allow resilience to take negative values. We do this in a framework where both market depth and resilience are stochastic processes.
Statistical properties of an order book and the effect they have on price dynamics were studied using the high-frequency NASDAQ Level II data. It was observed that the size distribution of marketable orders (transaction sizes) has power law tails with an exponent 1+mu_{market}=2.4 \pm 0.1. The distribution of limit order sizes was found to be consistent with a power law with an exponent close to 2. A somewhat better fit to this distribution was obtained by using a log-normal distribution with an effective power law exponent equal to 2 in the middle of the observed range. The depth of the order…
In this paper, we study various new Hawkes processes. Specifically, we construct general compound Hawkes processes and investigate their properties in limit order books. With regards to these general compound Hawkes processes, we prove a Law of Large Numbers (LLN) and a Functional Central Limit Theorems (FCLT) for several specific variations. We apply several of these FCLTs to limit order books to study the link between price volatility and order flow, where the volatility in mid-price changes is expressed in terms of parameters describing the arrival rates and mid-price process.
Managing the prediction of metrics in high-frequency financial markets is a challenging task. An efficient way is by monitoring the dynamics of a limit order book to identify the information edge. This paper describes the first publicly available benchmark dataset of high-frequency limit order markets for mid-price prediction. We extracted normalized data representations of time series data for five stocks from the NASDAQ Nordic stock market for a time period of ten consecutive days, leading to a dataset of ~4,000,000 time series samples in total. A day-based anchored cross-validation experime…
We propose a simple stochastic model for the dynamics of a limit order book, extending the recent work of Cont and de Larrard (2013), where the price dynamics are endogenous, resulting from market transactions. We also show that the conditional diffusion limit of the price process is the so-called Brownian meander.
We generalise the description of the dynamics of the order book of financial markets in terms of a Brownian particle embedded in a fluid of incoming, exiting and annihilating particles by presenting a model of the velocity on each side (buy and sell) independently. The improved model builds on the time-averaged number of particles in the inner layer and its change per unit time, where the inner layer is revealed by the correlations between price velocity and change in the number of particles (limit orders). This allows us to introduce the Knudsen number of the financial Brownian particle motio…
We propose an analytically tractable class of models for the dynamics of a limit order book, described through a stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE) with multiplicative noise for the order book centered at the mid-price, along with stochastic dynamics for the mid-price which is consistent with the order flow dynamics. We provide conditions under which the model admits a finite dimensional realization driven by a (low-dimensional) Markov process, leading to efficient estimation and computation methods. We study two examples of parsimonious models in this class: a two-factor model an…
We propose a general framework to describe the impact of different events in the order book, that generalizes previous work on the impact of market orders. Two different modeling routes can be considered, which are equivalent when only market orders are taken into account. One model posits that each event type has a temporary impact (TIM). The "history dependent impact" model (HDIM), on the other hand, assumes that only price-changing events have a direct impact, itself modulated by the past history of all events through an "influence matrix" that measures how much, on average, an event of a g…
When modelling stock market dynamics, the price formation is often based on an equilbrium mechanism. In real stock exchanges, however, the price formation is goverend by the order book. It is thus interesting to check if the resulting stylized facts of a model with equilibrium pricing change, remain the same or, more generally, are compatible with the order book environment. We tackle this issue in the framework of a case study by embedding the Bornholdt-Kaizoji-Fujiwara spin model into the order book dynamics. To this end, we use a recently developed agent based model that realistically incor…
The paper considers a general semi-Markov model for Limit Order Books with two states, which incorporates price changes that are not fixed to one tick. Furthermore, we introduce an even more general case of the semi-Markov model for LimitOrder Books that incorporates an arbitrary number of states for the price changes. For both cases the justifications, diffusion limits, implementations and numerical results are presented for different Limit Order Book data: Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Intel on 2012/06/21 and Cisco, Facebook, Intel, Liberty Global, Liberty Interactive, Microsoft, Vodafon…
This paper consists of two parts. The first part is devoted to empirical analysis of consolidated order book (COB) for the index RTS futures. In the second part we consider Poissonian multi--agent model of the COB. By varying parameters of different groups of agents submitting orders to the book we are able to model various real life phenomenons. In particular we model the spread, the profile of the book and large price changes. Two different mechanisms of large price changes are considered in detail. One is the disbalance of liquidity in the COB and another is the disbalance of sell and buy o…
We study the dynamics of the limit order book of liquid stocks after experiencing large intra-day price changes. In the data we find large variations in several microscopical measures, e.g., the volatility the bid-ask spread, the bid-ask imbalance, the number of queuing limit orders, the activity (number and volume) of limit orders placed and canceled, etc. The relaxation of the quantities is generally very slow that can be described by a power law of exponent $\approx0.4$. We introduce a numerical model in order to understand the empirical results better. We find that with a zero intelligence…
High frequency financial data is burdened by a level of randomness that is unavoidable and obfuscates the task of modelling. This idea is reflected in the intraday evolution of limit orders book data for many financial assets and suggests several justifications for the use of stochastic models. For instance, the arbitrary distribution of inter arrival times and the subsequent dependence structure between consecutive book events. This has lead to the development of many stochastic models for the dynamics of limit order books. In this paper we look to examine the adaptability of one family of su…
This paper studies a limit order book (LOB) model, in which the order dynamics depend on both, the current best available prices and the current volume density functions. For the joint dynamics of the best bid price, the best ask price, and the standing volume densities on both sides of the LOB we derive a weak law of large numbers, which states that the LOB model converges to a continuous-time limit when the size of an individual order as well as the tick size tend to zero and the order arrival rate tends to infinity. In the scaling limit the two volume densities follow each a non-linear PDE …
Motivated by the desire to bridge the gap between the microscopic description of price formation (agent-based modeling) and the stochastic differential equations approach used classically to describe price evolution at macroscopic time scales, we present a mathematical study of the order book as a multidimensional continuous-time Markov chain and derive several mathematical results in the case of independent Poissonian arrival times. In particular, we show that the cancellation structure is an important factor ensuring the existence of a stationary distribution and the exponential convergence …
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are types of artificial neural networks (ANNs) that are well suited to forecasting and sequence classification. They have been applied extensively to forecasting univariate financial time series, however their application to high frequency trading has not been previously considered. This paper solves a sequence classification problem in which a short sequence of observations of limit order book depths and market orders is used to predict a next event price-flip. The capability to adjust quotes according to this prediction reduces the likelihood of adverse price…
In this paper we derive a second order approximation for an infinite dimensional limit order book model, in which the dynamics of the incoming order flow is allowed to depend on the current market price as well as on a volume indicator (e.g.~the volume standing at the top of the book). We study the fluctuations of the price and volume process relative to their first order approximation given in ODE-PDE form under two different scaling regimes. In the first case we suppose that price changes are really rare, yielding a constant first order approximation for the price. This leads to a measure-va…
We propose a model for the dynamics of a limit order book in a liquid market where buy and sell orders are submitted at high frequency. We derive a functional central limit theorem for the joint dynamics of the bid and ask queues and show that, when the frequency of order arrivals is large, the intraday dynamics of the limit order book may be approximated by a Markovian jump-diffusion process in the positive orthant, whose characteristics are explicitly described in terms of the statistical properties of the underlying order flow. This result allows to obtain tractable analytical approximation…
We propose a microscopic model to describe the dynamics of the fundamental events in the limit order book (LOB): order arrivals and cancellations. It is based on an operator algebra for individual orders and describes their effect on the LOB. The model inputs are arrival and cancellation rate distributions that emerge from individual behavior of traders, and we show how prices and liquidity arise from the LOB dynamics. In a simulation study we illustrate how the model works and highlight its sensitivity with respect to assumptions regarding the collective behavior of market participants. Empir…
We propose a framework to study the optimal liquidation strategy in a limit order book for large-tick stocks, with spread equal to one tick. All order book events (market orders, limit orders and cancellations) occur according to independent Poisson processes, with parameters depending on price move directions. Our goal is to maximise the expected terminal wealth of an agent who needs to liquidate her positions within a fixed time horizon. Assuming that the agent trades (through sell limit order or/and sell market order) only when the price moves, we model her liquidation procedure as a semi-M…
We define a stochastic model of a two-sided limit order book in terms of its key quantities \textit{best bid [ask] price} and the \textit{standing buy [sell] volume density}. For a simple scaling of the discreteness parameters, that keeps the expected volume rate over the considered price interval invariant, we prove a limit theorem. The limit theorem states that, given regularity conditions on the random order flow, the key quantities converge in probability to a tractable continuous limiting model. In the limit model the buy and sell volume densities are given as the unique solution to first…
