The Microstructure of Financial Markets


Book Description

The analysis of the microstructure of financial markets has been one of the most important areas of research in finance and has allowed scholars and practitioners alike to have a much more sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of price formation in financial markets. Frank de Jong and Barbara Rindi provide an integrated graduate level textbook treatment of the theory and empirics of the subject, starting with a detailed description of the trading systems on stock exchanges and other markets and then turning to economic theory and asset pricing models. Special attention is paid to models explaining transaction costs, with a treatment of the measurement of these costs and the implications for the return on investment. The final chapters review recent developments in the academic literature. End-of-chapter exercises and downloadable data from the book's companion website provide opportunities to revise and apply models developed in the text.




Trades, Quotes and Prices


Book Description

The widespread availability of high-quality, high-frequency data has revolutionised the study of financial markets. By describing not only asset prices, but also market participants' actions and interactions, this wealth of information offers a new window into the inner workings of the financial ecosystem. In this original text, the authors discuss empirical facts of financial markets and introduce a wide range of models, from the micro-scale mechanics of individual order arrivals to the emergent, macro-scale issues of market stability. Throughout this journey, data is king. All discussions are firmly rooted in the empirical behaviour of real stocks, and all models are calibrated and evaluated using recent data from Nasdaq. By confronting theory with empirical facts, this book for practitioners, researchers and advanced students provides a fresh, new, and often surprising perspective on topics as diverse as optimal trading, price impact, the fragile nature of liquidity, and even the reasons why people trade at all.




Liquidity, Markets and Trading in Action


Book Description

This open access book addresses four standard business school subjects: microeconomics, macroeconomics, finance and information systems as they relate to trading, liquidity, and market structure. It provides a detailed examination of the impact of trading costs and other impediments of trading that the authors call rictions It also presents an interactive simulation model of equity market trading, TraderEx, that enables students to implement trading decisions in different market scenarios and structures. Addressing these topics shines a bright light on how a real-world financial market operates, and the simulation provides students with an experiential learning opportunity that is informative and fun. Each of the chapters is designed so that it can be used as a stand-alone module in an existing economics, finance, or information science course. Instructor resources such as discussion questions, Powerpoint slides and TraderEx exercises are available online.




High-Frequency Trading


Book Description

A fully revised second edition of the best guide to high-frequency trading High-frequency trading is a difficult, but profitable, endeavor that can generate stable profits in various market conditions. But solid footing in both the theory and practice of this discipline are essential to success. Whether you're an institutional investor seeking a better understanding of high-frequency operations or an individual investor looking for a new way to trade, this book has what you need to make the most of your time in today's dynamic markets. Building on the success of the original edition, the Second Edition of High-Frequency Trading incorporates the latest research and questions that have come to light since the publication of the first edition. It skillfully covers everything from new portfolio management techniques for high-frequency trading and the latest technological developments enabling HFT to updated risk management strategies and how to safeguard information and order flow in both dark and light markets. Includes numerous quantitative trading strategies and tools for building a high-frequency trading system Address the most essential aspects of high-frequency trading, from formulation of ideas to performance evaluation The book also includes a companion Website where selected sample trading strategies can be downloaded and tested Written by respected industry expert Irene Aldridge While interest in high-frequency trading continues to grow, little has been published to help investors understand and implement this approach—until now. This book has everything you need to gain a firm grip on how high-frequency trading works and what it takes to apply it to your everyday trading endeavors.







Market Liquidity


Book Description

"The process by which securities are traded is very different from the idealized picture of a frictionless and self-equilibrating market offered by the typical finance textbook. This book offers a more accurate and authoritative take on this process. The book starts from the assumption that not everyone is present at all times simultaneously on the market, and that participants have quite diverse information about the security's fundamentals. As a result, the order flow is a complex mix of information and noise, and a consensus price only emerges gradually over time as the trading process evolves and the participants interpret the actions of other traders. Thus, a security's actual transaction price may deviate from its fundamental value, as it would be assessed by a fully informed set of investors. The book takes these deviations seriously, and explains why and how they emerge in the trading process and are eventually eliminated. The authors draw on a vast body of theoretical insights and empirical findings on security price formation that have come to form a well-defined field within financial economics known as "market microstructure." Focusing on liquidity and price discovery, the book analyzes the tension between the two, pointing out that when price-relevant information reaches the market through trading pressure rather than through a public announcement, liquidity may suffer. It also confronts many striking phenomena in securities markets and uses the analytical tools and empirical methods of market microstructure to understand them. These include issues such as why liquidity changes over time and differs across securities, why large trades move prices up or down, and why these price changes are subsequently reversed, and why we observe temporary deviations from asset fair values"--




Limit Order Books


Book Description

A limit order book is essentially a file on a computer that contains all orders sent to the market, along with their characteristics such as the sign of the order, price, quantity and a timestamp. The majority of organized electronic markets rely on limit order books to store the list of interests of market participants on their central computer. A limit order book contains all the information available on a specific market and it reflects the way the market moves under the influence of its participants. This book discusses several models of limit order books. It begins by discussing the data to assess their empirical properties, and then moves on to mathematical models in order to reproduce the observed properties. Finally, the book presents a framework for numerical simulations. It also covers important modelling techniques including agent-based modelling, and advanced modelling of limit order books based on Hawkes processes. The book also provides in-depth coverage of simulation techniques and introduces general, flexible, open source library concepts useful to readers studying trading strategies in order-driven markets.




Market Microstructure In Practice (Second Edition)


Book Description

This book exposes and comments on the consequences of Reg NMS and MiFID on market microstructure. It covers changes in market design, electronic trading, and investor and trader behaviors. The emergence of high frequency trading and critical events like the'Flash Crash' of 2010 are also analyzed in depth.Using a quantitative viewpoint, this book explains how an attrition of liquidity and regulatory changes can impact the whole microstructure of financial markets. A mathematical Appendix details the quantitative tools and indicators used through the book, allowing the reader to go further independently.This book is written by practitioners and theoretical experts and covers practical aspects (like the optimal infrastructure needed to trade electronically in modern markets) and abstract analyses (like the use on entropy measurements to understand the progress of market fragmentation).As market microstructure is a recent academic field, students will benefit from the book's overview of the current state of microstructure and will use the Appendix to understand important methodologies. Policy makers and regulators will use this book to access theoretical analyses on real cases. For readers who are practitioners, this book delivers data analysis and basic processes like the designs of Smart Order Routing and trade scheduling algorithms.In this second edition, the authors have added a large section on orderbook dynamics, showing how liquidity can predict future price moves, and how High Frequency Traders can profit from it. The section on market impact has also been updated to show how buying or selling pressure moves prices not only for a few hours, but even for days, and how prices relax (or not) after a period of intense pressure.Further, this edition includes pages on Dark Pools, Circuit Breakers and added information outside of Equity Trading, because MiFID 2 is likely to push fixed income markets towards more electronification. The authors explore what is to be expected from this change in microstructure. The appendix has also been augmented to include the propagator models (for intraday price impact), a simple version of Kyle's model (1985) for daily market impact, and a more sophisticated optimal trading framework, to support the design of trading algorithms.




High-frequency Trading And Probability Theory


Book Description

This book is the first of its kind to treat high-frequency trading and technical analysis as accurate sciences. The authors reveal how to build trading algorithms of high-frequency trading and obtain stable statistical arbitrage from the financial market in detail. The authors' arguments are based on rigorous mathematical and statistical deductions and this will appeal to people who believe in the theoretical aspect of the topic.Investors who believe in technical analysis will find out how to verify the efficiency of their technical arguments by ergodic theory of stationary stochastic processes, which form a mathematical background for technical analysis. The authors also discuss technical details of the IT system design for high-frequency trading.




Algorithmic Trading and Quantitative Strategies


Book Description

Algorithmic Trading and Quantitative Strategies provides an in-depth overview of this growing field with a unique mix of quantitative rigor and practitioner’s hands-on experience. The focus on empirical modeling and practical know-how makes this book a valuable resource for students and professionals. The book starts with the often overlooked context of why and how we trade via a detailed introduction to market structure and quantitative microstructure models. The authors then present the necessary quantitative toolbox including more advanced machine learning models needed to successfully operate in the field. They next discuss the subject of quantitative trading, alpha generation, active portfolio management and more recent topics like news and sentiment analytics. The last main topic of execution algorithms is covered in detail with emphasis on the state of the field and critical topics including the elusive concept of market impact. The book concludes with a discussion on the technology infrastructure necessary to implement algorithmic strategies in large-scale production settings. A git-hub repository includes data-sets and explanatory/exercise Jupyter notebooks. The exercises involve adding the correct code to solve the particular analysis/problem.