Vincent Yinjun-Wang | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

Convex Modeling of Price Cross-Impact over Time

Transaction costs can make or break a trading strategy, particularly in relative-value trading of commodity and macro markets, where edges are a few basis points. Price impact is a central component of transaction cost. Price impact models usually include self-impact (a trade in a contract moves that contract's price) but omit two well-documented effects: cross-impact (a trade in one contract also moves the prices of related contracts) and transient impact (price impact decays over time, so an unwind recovers part of the entry cost). A model without these effects overprices the impact of relative-value trades, whose correlated legs are built and unwound over days, and so forgoes potentially profitable trades. This paper models both effects with a convex quadratic cost. In each period, a positive semidefinite matrix built from volatility, volume, and correlation forecasts couples trades across contracts. A power-law decay kernel then couples trades across periods. The resulting cost admits no price manipulation even when liquidity varies over the planning horizon. The model is demonstrated empirically on calendar spread trading of crude oil futures around the commodity index roll.

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arXiv2026

Battery Bidding under Price Uncertainty in Wholesale Electricity Markets

Grid-scale batteries increasingly influence outcomes in wholesale electricity markets, but their observed bid patterns remain difficult to interpret. In particular, bids that appear to reflect strategic withholding may instead arise from rational operations under price uncertainty and risk management. We develop an asset-level model of a price-taking battery that submits stepwise buy and sell bid curves in the day-ahead market under a finite set of price scenarios. The battery chooses quantity--price pairs to maximize a mean--CVaR objective subject to physical and market constraints. A direct formulation is a mixed-integer linear program, but we show that its integer decisions can be removed, yielding an exact linear programming reformulation suitable for empirical analysis. Our empirical results deliver three insights. First, withholding behavior can arise even without market power, because scarce stored energy and uncertain future prices increase the value of holding energy. Second, the effect of uncertainty depends on the state of charge: when stored energy is scarce, greater uncertainty raises sell bid prices, whereas when stored energy is abundant it can lower them. Third, risk management reshapes bid curves into layered structures that secure profitable execution across a broad set of scenarios while preserving some exposure to rare but valuable price spikes.

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