Understanding the worst-kept secret of high-frequency trading
通过分析做市商的最优报价策略，研究了限价订单簿中成交量不平衡与价格变动的关系，发现不平衡可作为价格变动的预测指标，并可用于选择合适的最小报价单位。
Abstract Volume imbalance in a limit order book is often considered as a reliable indicator for predicting future price moves. In this work, we seek to analyse the nuances of the relationship between prices and volume imbalance. To this end, we study a market-making problem which allows us to view the imbalance as an optimal response to price moves. In our model, there is an underlying efficient price driving the mid-price, which follows the model with uncertainty zones. A single market maker knows the underlying efficient price and consequently the probability of a mid-price jump in the future. She controls the volumes she quotes at the best bid and ask prices. Solving her optimisation problem allows us to understand endogenously the price–imbalance connection and to confirm in particular that it is optimal to quote a predictive imbalance. Our model can also be used by a platform to select a suitable tick size, which is known to be a crucial topic in financial regulation. The value function of the market maker’s control problem can be viewed as a family of functions, indexed by the level of the market maker’s inventory, solving a coupled system of PDEs. We show existence and uniqueness of classical solutions to this coupled system of equations. In the case of a continuous inventory, we also prove uniqueness of the market maker’s optimal control policy.