arXiv subjects

Bence Toth

Publications and source records attributed to Bence Toth.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

Microfounding GARCH Models and Beyond: A Kyle-inspired Model with Adaptive Agents

We relax the strong rationality assumption for the agents in the paradigmatic Kyle model of price formation, thereby reconciling the framework of asymmetrically informed traders with the Adaptive Market Hypothesis, where agents use inductive rather than deductive reasoning. Building on these ideas, we propose a stylised model able to account parsimoniously for a rich phenomenology, ranging from excess volatility to volatility clustering. While characterising the excess-volatility dynamics, we provide a microfoundation for GARCH models. Volatility clustering is shown to be related to the self-excited dynamics induced by traders' behaviour, and does not rely on clustered fundamental innovations. Finally, we propose an extension to account for the fragile dynamics exhibited by real markets during flash crashes.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2020

Zooming In on Equity Factor Crowding

Crowding is most likely an important factor in the deterioration of strategy performance, the increase of trading costs and the development of systemic risk. We study the imprints of \emph{crowding} on both anonymous market data and a large database of metaorders from institutional investors in the U.S. equity market. We propose direct metrics of crowding that capture the presence of investors contemporaneously trading the same stock in the same direction by looking at fluctuations of the imbalances of trades executed on the market. We identify significant signs of crowding in well known equity signals, such as Fama-French factors and especially Momentum. We show that the rebalancing of a Momentum portfolio can explain between 1-2\% of order flow, and that this percentage has been significantly increasing in recent years.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2017

The short-term price impact of trades is universal

We analyze a proprietary dataset of trades by a single asset manager, comparing their price impact with that of the trades of the rest of the market. In the context of a linear propagator model we find no significant difference between the two, suggesting that both the magnitude and time dependence of impact are universal in anonymous, electronic markets. This result is important as optimal execution policies often rely on propagators calibrated on anonymous data. We also find evidence that in the wake of a trade the order flow of other market participants first adds further copy-cat trades enhancing price impact on very short time scales. The induced order flow then quickly inverts, thereby contributing to impact decay.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2016

Linear models for the impact of order flow on prices II. The Mixture Transition Distribution model

Modeling the impact of the order flow on asset prices is of primary importance to understand the behavior of financial markets. Part I of this paper reported the remarkable improvements in the description of the price dynamics which can be obtained when one incorporates the impact of past returns on the future order flow. However, impact models presented in Part I consider the order flow as an exogenous process, only characterized by its two-point correlations. This assumption seriously limits the forecasting ability of the model. Here we attempt to model directly the stream of discrete events with a so-called Mixture Transition Distribution (MTD) framework, introduced originally by Raftery (1985). We distinguish between price-changing and non price-changing events and combine them with the order sign in order to reduce the order flow dynamics to the dynamics of a four-state discrete random variable. The MTD represents a parsimonious approximation of a full high-order Markov chain. The new approach captures with adequate realism the conditional correlation functions between signed events for both small and large tick stocks and signature plots. From a methodological viewpoint, we discuss a novel and flexible way to calibrate a large class of MTD models with a very large number of parameters. In spite of this large number of parameters, an out-of-sample analysis confirms that the model does not overfit the data.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2016

The square-root impact law also holds for option markets

Many independent studies on stocks and futures contracts have established that market impact is proportional to the square-root of the executed volume. Is market impact quantitatively similar for option markets as well? In order to answer this question, we have analyzed the impact of a large proprietary data set of option trades. We find that the square-root law indeed holds in that case. This finding supports the argument for a universal underlying mechanism.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2016

Linear models for the impact of order flow on prices I. Propagators: Transient vs. History Dependent Impact

Market impact is a key concept in the study of financial markets and several models have been proposed in the literature so far. The Transient Impact Model (TIM) posits that the price at high frequency time scales is a linear combination of the signs of the past executed market orders, weighted by a so-called propagator function. An alternative description -- the History Dependent Impact Model (HDIM) -- assumes that the deviation between the realised order sign and its expected level impacts the price linearly and permanently. The two models, however, should be extended since prices are a priori influenced not only by the past order flow, but also by the past realisation of returns themselves. In this paper, we propose a two-event framework, where price-changing and non price-changing events are considered separately. Two-event propagator models provide a remarkable improvement of the description of the market impact, especially for large tick stocks, where the events of price changes are very rare and very informative. Specifically the extended approach captures the excess anti-correlation between past returns and subsequent order flow which is missing in one-event models. Our results document the superior performances of the HDIMs even though only in minor relative terms compared to TIMs. This is somewhat surprising, because HDIMs are well grounded theoretically, while TIMs are, strictly speaking, inconsistent.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2014

Anomalous impact in reaction-diffusion models

We generalize the reaction-diffusion model A + B -> 0 in order to study the impact of an excess of A (or B) at the reaction front. We provide an exact solution of the model, which shows that linear response breaks down: the average displacement of the reaction front grows as the square-root of the imbalance. We argue that this model provides a highly simplified but generic framework to understand the square-root impact of large orders in financial markets.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2013

Agent-based models for latent liquidity and concave price impact

We revisit the "epsilon-intelligence" model of Toth et al.(2011), that was proposed as a minimal framework to understand the square-root dependence of the impact of meta-orders on volume in financial markets. The basic idea is that most of the daily liquidity is "latent" and furthermore vanishes linearly around the current price, as a consequence of the diffusion of the price itself. However, the numerical implementation of Toth et al. was criticised as being unrealistic, in particular because all the "intelligence" was conferred to market orders, while limit orders were passive and random. In this work, we study various alternative specifications of the model, for example allowing limit orders to react to the order flow, or changing the execution protocols. By and large, our study lends strong support to the idea that the square-root impact law is a very generic and robust property that requires very few ingredients to be valid. We also show that the transition from super-diffusion to sub-diffusion reported in Toth et al. is in fact a cross-over, but that the original model can be slightly altered in order to give rise to a genuine phase transition, which is of interest on its own. We finally propose a general theoretical framework to understand how a non-linear impact may appear even in the limit where the bias in the order flow is vanishingly small.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2012

How does the market react to your order flow?

We present an empirical study of the intertwined behaviour of members in a financial market. Exploiting a database where the broker that initiates an order book event can be identified, we decompose the correlation and response functions into contributions coming from different market participants and study how their behaviour is interconnected. We find evidence that (1) brokers are very heterogeneous in liquidity provision -- some are consistently liquidity providers while others are consistently liquidity takers. (2) The behaviour of brokers is strongly conditioned on the actions of {\it other} brokers. In contrast brokers are only weakly influenced by the impact of their own previous orders. (3) The total impact of market orders is the result of a subtle compensation between the same broker pushing the price in one direction and the liquidity provision of other brokers pushing it in the opposite direction. These results enforce the picture of market dynamics being the result of the competition between heterogeneous participants interacting to form a complicated market ecology.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2011

Anomalous price impact and the critical nature of liquidity in financial markets

We propose a dynamical theory of market liquidity that predicts that the average supply/demand profile is V-shaped and {\it vanishes} around the current price. This result is generic, and only relies on mild assumptions about the order flow and on the fact that prices are (to a first approximation) diffusive. This naturally accounts for two striking stylized facts: first, large metaorders have to be fragmented in order to be digested by the liquidity funnel, leading to long-memory in the sign of the order flow. Second, the anomalously small local liquidity induces a breakdown of linear response and a diverging impact of small orders, explaining the "square-root" impact law, for which we provide additional empirical support. Finally, we test our arguments quantitatively using a numerical model of order flow based on the same minimal ingredients.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2011

Why is order flow so persistent?

Order flow in equity markets is remarkably persistent in the sense that order signs (to buy or sell) are positively autocorrelated out to time lags of tens of thousands of orders, corresponding to many days. Two possible explanations are herding, corresponding to positive correlation in the behavior of different investors, or order splitting, corresponding to positive autocorrelation in the behavior of single investors. We investigate this using order flow data from the London Stock Exchange for which we have membership identifiers. By formulating models for herding and order splitting, as well as models for brokerage choice, we are able to overcome the distortion introduced by brokerage. On timescales of less than a few hours the persistence of order flow is overwhelmingly due to splitting rather than herding. We also study the properties of brokerage order flow and show that it is remarkably consistent both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2010

Segmentation algorithm for non-stationary compound Poisson processes

We introduce an algorithm for the segmentation of a class of regime switching processes. The segmentation algorithm is a non parametric statistical method able to identify the regimes (patches) of the time series. The process is composed of consecutive patches of variable length, each patch being described by a stationary compound Poisson process, i.e. a Poisson process where each count is associated to a fluctuating signal. The parameters of the process are different in each patch and therefore the time series is non stationary. Our method is a generalization of the algorithm introduced by Bernaola-Galvan, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 87, 168105 (2001). We show that the new algorithm outperforms the original one for regime switching compound Poisson processes. As an application we use the algorithm to segment the time series of the inventory of market members of the London Stock Exchange and we observe that our method finds almost three times more patches than the original one.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2009

Studies of the limit order book around large price changes

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 deposition model of the order flow the empirical results can be reproduced qualitatively. This suggests that the slow relaxations might not be results of agents' strategic behaviour. Studying the difference between the exponents found empirically and numerically helps us to better identify the role of strategic behaviour in the phenomena.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2009

Accurate estimator of correlations between asynchronous signals

The estimation of the correlation between time series is often hampered by the asynchronicity of the signals. Cumulating data within a time window suppresses this source of noise but weakens the statistics. We present a method to estimate correlations without applying long time windows. We decompose the correlations of data cumulated over a long window using decay of lagged correlations as calculated from short window data. This increases the accuracy of the estimated correlation significantly and decreases the necessary efforts of calculations both in real and computer experiments.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2008

The Epps effect revisited

We analyse the dependence of stock return cross-correlations on the sampling frequency of the data known as the Epps effect: For high resolution data the cross-correlations are significantly smaller than their asymptotic value as observed on daily data. The former description implies that changing trading frequency should alter the characteristic time of the phenomenon. This is not true for the empirical data: The Epps curves do not scale with market activity. The latter result indicates that the time scale of the phenomenon is connected to the reaction time of market participants (this we denote as human time scale), independent of market activity. In this paper we give a new description of the Epps effect through the decomposition of cross-correlations. After testing our method on a model of generated random walk price changes we justify our analytical results by fitting the Epps curves of real world data.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2007

The value of information in financial markets: An agent-based simulation

We present results on simulations of a stock market with heterogeneous, cumulative information setup. We find a non-monotonic behaviour of traders' returns as a function of their information level. Particularly, the average informed agents underperform random traders; only the most informed agents are able to beat the market. We also study the effect of a strategy updating mechanism, when traders have the possibility of using other pieces of information than the fundamental value. These results corroborate the latter ones: it is only for the most informed player that it is rewarding to stay fundamentalist. The simulations reproduce some stylized facts of tick-by-tick stock-exchange data and globally show informational efficiency.

q-fin.TR↗

arXiv2007

Modeling the Epps effect of cross correlations in asset prices

We review the decomposition method of stock return cross-correlations, presented previously for studying the dependence of the correlation coefficient on the resolution of data (Epps effect). Through a toy model of random walk/Brownian motion and memoryless renewal process (i.e. Poisson point process) of observation times we show that in case of analytical treatability, by decomposing the correlations we get the exact result for the frequency dependence. We also demonstrate that our approach produces reasonable fitting of the dependence of correlations on the data resolution in case of empirical data. Our results indicate that the Epps phenomenon is a product of the finite time decay of lagged correlations of high resolution data, which does not scale with activity. The characteristic time is due to a human time scale, the time needed to react to news.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2007

On the origin of the Epps effect

The Epps effect, the decrease of correlations between stock returns for short time windows, was traced back to the trading asynchronicity and to the occasional lead-lag relation between the prices. We study pairs of stocks where the latter is negligible and confirm the importance of asynchronicity but point out that alone these aspects are insufficient to give account for the whole effect.

physics.soc-ph↗