We consider a finite-horizon market-making problem faced by a dark pool that executes incoming buy and sell orders. The arrival flow of such orders is assumed to be random and, for each transaction, the dark pool earns a per-share commission no greater than the half bid-ask spread. Throughout the entire period, the main concern is inventory risk, which increases as the number of held positions becomes critically small or large. The dark pool can control its inventory by choosing the size of the commission for each transaction, so to encourage, e.g., buy orders instead of sell orders. Furthermore, it can submit lit-pool limit orders, of which execution is uncertain, and market orders, which are expensive. In either case, the dark pool risks an information leakage, which we model via a fixed penalty for trading in the lit pool. We solve a double-obstacle impulse-control problem associated with the optimal management of the inventory, and we show that the value function is the unique viscosity solution of the associated system of quasi variational inequalities. We explore various numerical examples of the proposed model, including one that admits a semi-explicit solution.
In this article, we provide a flexible framework for optimal trading in an asset listed on different venues. We take into account the dependencies between the imbalance and spread of the venues, and allow for partial execution of limit orders at different limits as well as market orders. We present a Bayesian update of the model parameters to take into account possibly changing market conditions and propose extensions to include short/long trading signals, market impact or hidden liquidity. To solve the stochastic control problem of the trader we apply the finite difference method and also dev…
We investigate whether the fee income from trades on the CFM is sufficient for the liquidity providers to hedge away the exposure to market risk. We first analyse this problem through the lens of continuous-time financial mathematics and derive an upper bound for not-arbitrage fee income that would make CFM efficient and liquidity provision fair. We then evaluate our findings by performing multi-agent simulations by varying CFM fees, market volatility, and rate of arrival of liquidity takers. We observe that, on average, fee income generated from liquidity provision is insufficient to compensa…
Liquidity and trading activity on constant function market makers (CFMMs) such as Uniswap, Curve, and Balancer has grown significantly in the second half of 2020. Much of the growth of these protocols has been driven by incentivized pools or 'yield farming', which reward participants in crypto assets for providing liquidity to CFMMs. As a result, CFMMs and associated protocols, which were historically very small markets, now constitute the most liquid trading venues for a large number of crypto assets. But what does it mean for a CFMM to be the most liquid market? In this paper, we propose a b…
