Liquidity Imbalance Research Articles

The collapse of the FTX exchange: The end of cryptocurrency's age of innocence

The sudden collapse of the FTX exchange appears to have unearthed several fundamental ethical, regulatory, and policy-based flaws, inherently damaging the cryptocurrency industry at large. The following research outlines the key events that led to the bankruptcy of FTX while examining industry-wide implications as a consequence of an acute risk management failure. Results indicate severe risk and liquidity imbalances between the assets and liabilities of FTX, which contributed to the collapse of the exchange and subsequently led to contagion effects across a range of financial market products. The insolvency of FTX should serve as a significant warning to policymakers and regulators, specifically surrounding the valuation, reserving, and corporate usage of permissionless, privately-issued cryptocurrencies.

Первичный анализ пригодности акций для включения в активную торговую стратегию

The article lists the problems inherent to the Russian stock market at the present stage, special attention is paid to the liquidity issues. The authors evaluate the shares of all issuers listed on the Moscow Stock Exchange for the possibility of their inclusion in an active strategy based on average trading volumes. The article calculates the effectiveness of using the methods of average values in assessing the compliance of the selected instruments with the minimum required liquidity values. In the course of the work, the industry features of the Russian market are taken into account. The classifier of the Moscow Exchange is used to distribute issuers by industry. In parallel, the liquidity imbalance between the branches of the Russian stock market is being investigated. The conclusion is given about the real number of stock market instruments suitable for use in active trading strategies. The result of the study is a formed set of shares distributed by industry.

Determination of Strategic Spreads in East Asia

ABSTRACT This study develops a simple spread model to explain whether market dealers behave strategically when using electronic broking services. Our spread model stresses the role of an unexpected liquidity imbalance and its volatility for inventory risk, which contrasts sharply with previous studies that emphasised price volatility as the inventory risk. To capture a dealer’s strategic behaviour, we introduce a new concept of a strategic weighted spread and test this new spread using the full information maximum likelihood method with the GARCH (1,1) process. Daily spread data from 1 January 2006 to 20 December 2016 is used to explore strategic spreading at the end of a trading day in East Asia. Different effects on strategic spreads of liquidity depth in Asian financial markets are also investigated by comparing strategic spreads between the thin and deep markets. The evidence provides support for our hypothesis that a dealer behaves strategically to avoid the unexpected inventory risk, and that the magnitude of this influence depends on the depth of the financial market.

Intraday price jumps, market liquidity, and the magnet effect of circuit breakers

This paper studies the magnet effect of market-wide circuit breakers using high-frequency data from the Chinese stock index futures market. Unlike previous studies that mainly analyze the price trend and volatility, this paper is the first to consider intraday price jumps in studying the magnet effect. We find that when a market-wide trading halt is imminent, both the probability of a price decrease and the level of market volatility remain stable. However, the conditional probability of observing a price jump increases significantly, leading to a higher possibility of triggering market-wide circuit breakers, which is in support of the magnet effect hypothesis. In addition, we find a significant increase in liquidity demand but no significant change in liquidity supply ahead of a market-wide trading halt, suggesting that liquidity imbalance plays an important role in explaining the magnet effect.

Liquidity Imbalance in the Residential Real Estate Market

This study emphasizes the importance of asset-based – as opposed to agent-based – housing liquidity measures, a house’s time on the market, and the time to buy for its buyer rather than its seller. It uses unique survey data to analyze spatial differences in the imbalance between these two measures in boom and bust markets of the 2000s. We find evidence of higher overall imbalance and its inter-ZIP code area dispersion in the booming years. Buyer search intensity diminishes the imbalance in boom and intensifies it in bust. Other revealed significant covariates have different effects under the two market conditions. Our model explains the liquidity imbalance variations on the ZIP code area level well, but not on the individual property level, highlighting the importance of regional idiosyncratic transaction dynamics.

The propagation of liquidity imbalances in manufacturing supply chains: evidence from a spatial auto-regressive approach

ABSTRACTThe number of distressed firms increased sharply during the last recessionary phase. The scope of the paper is to analyze determinants of distress by focusing the attention on trade-credit chains as the key source of contagion effects in 2009–2013. Financial and liquidity imbalances propagate along the supply chain: firms respond to late payments from customers by defaulting on payments to suppliers. The novelty of our approach consists of applying spatial econometric techniques to assess spillover effects of trade debt. We employ a representative sample of around 12,000 Italian manufacturing firms that combines balance sheet items with information collected in the Credit Register of the Italian central bank. Our proxy for supply-chain interconnections is a matrix of firm-to firm transactions which mirrors the networked structure of the industrial system. Estimates show that trade debt has been affected by spillover effects during the great crisis of 2009–2013. Moreover, trade debt and financial indebtedness exerted an impact of almost identical magnitude on firms' distress likelihoods. This evidence sheds light on the importance to move away from a static view of the trade-credit phenomenon, and to integrate solvency models with detailed information on firm-to-firm transactions which is increasingly available through big data collection.

Liquidity imbalance of commercial banks: Concept, evaluation methods

Liquidity imbalance of commercial banks: Concept, evaluation methods

The consequences of liquidity imbalance: When net lenders leave interbank markets

The level as well as fluency of capital supply on the interbank market is crucial for banking sector liquidity. However, the dominance of individual players on this market leads to liquidity imbalance and, thus, might increase the risk for other banks. We test how different bank exposures in interbank market translates into other bank liquidity risk and credit supply. To this end, we use 207 bank exits from interbank markets between 1997 and 2013 in 52 emerging and developed countries. We find that the withdrawal of a bank with high net exposure on interbank market leads to a statistically significant drop in the liquidity position of the remaining banks. The effect is also economically significant. Finally, we find that a liquidity imbalance adversely affects the bank credit supply. Our findings suggest that the consequences are more severe for banks heavily relying on the local interbank market, for emerging countries and surprisingly in pre-crisis periods.

Limit Order Strategic Placement with Adverse Selection Risk and the Role of Latency

This paper is split in three parts: first, we use labeled trade data to exhibit how market participants’ decisions depend on liquidity imbalance; then, we develop a stochastic control framework where agents monitor limit orders, by exploiting liquidity imbalance, to reduce adverse selection. For limit orders, we need optimal strategies essentially to find a balance between fast execution and avoiding adverse selection: if the price has chances to go down, the probability to be filled is high, but it is better to wait a little more to get a better price. In a third part, we show how the added value of exploiting liquidity imbalance is eroded by latency: being able to predict future liquidity consuming flows is of less use if you do not have enough time to cancel and reinsert your limit orders. There is thus a rationale for market makers to be as fast as possible to reduce adverse selection. Latency costs of our limit order driven strategy can be measured numerically. To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to make the connection between empirical evidences, a stochastic framework for limit orders including adverse selection, and the cost of latency. Our work is a first step to shed light on the role played by latency and adverse selection in optimal limit order placement.

The Consequences of Liquidity Imbalance: When Net Lenders Leave Interbank Markets

We examine the effect of liquidity imbalances on liquidity risk using 224 bank exits from interbank markets between 1994 and 2014 in 54 emerging and developed countries. We find that bank exits from interbank markets decrease bank liquidity, especially when net placers exit an interbank market. Moreover, we also show that banks try to improve their position by selling the most liquid assets, which due to the limited capital on the market leads to a liquidity crunch. Finally, we find that a liquidity imbalance adversely affects the bank credit supply. Our findings suggest that the consequences are more severe for emerging countries than for developed countries and in pre-crisis periods.

Cowboying Stock Market Herds with Robot Traders

One explanation for large stock market fluctuations is its tendency to herd behavior. We put forward an agent-based model where instabilities are the result of liquidity imbalances amplified by local interactions through imitation, and calibrate the model to match some key statistics of actual daily returns. We show that an aggregate market-maker type of liquidity injection is not successful in stabilizing prices due to the complex nature of the stock market. To offset liquidity shortages, we propose the use of locally triggered contrarian rules, and show that these mechanisms are effective in preventing extreme returns in our artificial stock market.

Liquidity crises on different time scales.

We present an empirical analysis of the microstructure of financial markets and, in particular, of the static and dynamic properties of liquidity. We find that on relatively large time scales (15 min) large price fluctuations are connected to the failure of the subtle mechanism of compensation between the flows of market and limit orders: in other words, the missed revelation of the latent order book breaks the dynamical equilibrium between the flows, triggering the large price jumps. On smaller time scales (30 s), instead, the static depletion of the limit order book is an indicator of an intrinsic fragility of the system, which is related to a strongly nonlinear enhancement of the response. In order to quantify this phenomenon we introduce a measure of the liquidity imbalance present in the book and we show that it is correlated to both the sign and the magnitude of the next price movement. These findings provide a quantitative definition of the effective liquidity, which proves to be strongly dependent on the considered time scales.

Efficiency of the price formation process in presence of high frequency participants: a mean field game analysis

This paper deals with a stochastic order-driven market model with waiting costs, for orderbooks with heterogenous traders. Offer and demand of liquidity drives price formation and traders anticipate future evolutions of the orderbook. The natural framework we use is mean field game theory, a class of stochastic differential games with a continuum of anonymous players. Several sources of heterogeneity are considered including the mean size of orders. Thus we are able to consider the coexistence of Institutional Investors and high frequency traders (HFT). We provide both analytical solutions and numerical experiments. Implications on classical quantities are explored: orderbook size, prices, and effective bid/ask spread. According to the model, in markets with Institutional Investors only we show the existence of inefficient liquidity imbalances in equilibrium, with two symmetrical situations corresponding to what we call liquidity calls for liquidity. During these situations the transaction price significantly moves away from the fair price. However this macro phenomenon disappears in markets with both Institutional Investors and HFT, although a more precise study shows that the benefits of the new situation go to HFT only, leaving Institutional Investors even with higher trading costs.

The Provision of Liquidity by High‐Frequency Participants

AbstractThis paper examines the order submission strategies and supply of liquidity by high‐frequency participants versus the remainder of participants in the limit order book. The results show that high‐frequency participants submit orders at multiple prices in the limit order book, concentrated at or within the quote. This activity translates into the provision of liquidity on an on‐going basis, which is robust to fast versus slow and volatile markets, together suggesting that high‐frequency participants resolve temporal liquidity imbalances in the limit order book. The evidence is consistent with high‐frequency trading (HFT) improving market liquidity, but there remain issues surrounding high‐frequency participants’ effect on market depth and the difficulty of trading of non‐HFT participants.

中国における違法な農地流動化の実態と要因ならびにその防止対策

中国における違法な農地流動化の実態と要因ならびにその防止対策

Currency Carry Trades, Position-Unwinding Risk, and Sovereign Credit Premia

This is the first study that employs option pricing model to measure the position-unwinding risk of currency carry trade portfolios, which well covers the moment information. We show that high interest-rate currencies are exposed to higher position-unwinding risk than low interest-rate currencies. We also investigate the sovereign CDS spreads as the proxy for countries' credit conditions and find that high interest-rate currencies load up positively on sovereign default risk while low interest-rate currencies provide a hedge against it. Sovereign credit premia as the dominant economic fundamental risk, together with position-unwinding likelihood indicator as the market risk (nonneutrality) sentiment, captures over 90% cross-sectional variations of carry trade excess returns. We identify sovereign credit risk as the impulsive country-specific risk that drives market volatility, and also its global contagion channels. Then We propose an alternative carry trade strategy immunized from crash risk, and a composite story of sovereign credit premia, global liquidity imbalances and liquidity reversal/spiral for explaining the forward premium puzzle.

The Intraday Pattern of Information Asymmetry, Spread, and Depth: Evidence from the NYSE

AbstractStudies suggest that investment flows, liquidity imbalances, and institutional trading may create intraday trading patterns and opportunities for investors to time their trades to reduce transaction costs. Motivated by these studies, we divide each trading day into 13 half‐hour trading intervals and measure information asymmetry from price changes, trade sizes, and trade directions. We find that information asymmetry starts high in the morning, drops continuously until it reaches a midday low during Interval 7, rises to a midday high during Interval 10, and drops continuously after. In contrast, neither the spread nor the depth exhibit similar midday extreme values. Essentially, we identify a 90‐min window in the afternoon when net valuable information arrives to the market in high frequency while liquidity is stable, and that may be an opportunity for some investors to time their trades. In addition, we show that market makers employ dynamic strategies that change the spread, the depth, or both to manage information asymmetry. This is particularly evident during the last three trading intervals, where the significant drop in information asymmetry is countered primarily by a significant increase in the depth while the spread is almost constant.

Intraday Patterns in the Cross‐section of Stock Returns

ABSTRACTMotivated by the literature on investment flows and optimal trading, we examine intraday predictability in the cross‐section of stock returns. We find a striking pattern of return continuation at half‐hour intervals that are exact multiples of a trading day, and this effect lasts for at least 40 trading days. Volume, order imbalance, volatility, and bid‐ask spreads exhibit similar patterns, but do not explain the return patterns. We also show that short‐term return reversal is driven by temporary liquidity imbalances lasting less than an hour and bid‐ask bounce. Timing trades can reduce execution costs by the equivalent of the effective spread.

Range-Based Proxies for Liquidity and Order Imbalance

Range-Based Proxies for Liquidity and Order Imbalance

Intraday Patterns in the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

Motivated by the literature on investment flows and optimal trading, we examine intraday predictability in the cross-section of stock returns. We find a striking pattern of return continuation at half-hour intervals that are exact multiples of a trading day, and this effect lasts for at least 40 trading days. Volume, order imbalance, volatility, and bid-ask spreads exhibit similar patterns, but do not explain the return patterns. We also show that short-term return reversal is driven by temporary liquidity imbalances lasting less than an hour and bid-ask bounce. Timing trades can reduce execution costs by the equivalent of the effective spread.