Wednesday, December 14th
5:45 PM Registration 6:00 PM Seminar Begins 7:30 PM Reception
The share of market making conducted by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms has been rising steadily. A distinguishing feature of HFTs is that they trade intraday, ending the day flat. To shed light on the economics of HFTs, and in a departure from existing market making theories, we model an HFT that has access to unlimited leverage intraday but must fund any end-of-day inventory at an exogenously determined cost. Even though the inventory costs only occur at the end of the day, they impact intraday price and liquidity dynamics. This gives rise to an intraday endogenous price impact mechanism. As time approaches the end of the trading day, the sensitivity of prices to inventory levels intensifies, making price impact stronger and widening bid-ask spreads. Moreover, imbalance of buy and sell orders may catalyze hikes and drops of prices, even under fixed supply and demand functions. Empirically, we show that these predictions are borne out in the U.S. Treasury market, where bid-ask spreads and price impact tend to rise towards the end of the day. Furthermore, price movements are negatively correlated with changes in inventory levels as measured by the cumulative net trading volume.
(Joint work with Tobias Adrian, Agostino Capponi, and Erik Vogt)
Biography
About the Series
The IAQF's Thalesians Seminar Series is a joint effort on the part of the IAQF (www.iaqf.org) and the Thalesians (www.thalesians.com). The goal of the series is to provide a forum for the exchange of new ideas and results related to the field of quantitative finance. This goal is accomplished by hosting seminars where leading practitioners and academics present new work, and following the seminars with a reception to facilitate further interaction and discussion.
