# Tag Info

26

Definitely check out Quantopian and Zipline. Quantopian provides a free research environment, backtester, and live trading rig (algos can be hooked up to Interactive Brokers). The algorithm development environment includes really handy collaboration tools and an open source debugger. They provide tons of data (even Morningstar fundamentals!) free of charge. ...

18

Flow trading is in spirit very similar to market making - such firms make a profit by earning a spread. There are 3 common ways this is done. Suppose a client wants to buy 100k shares of XYZ, which is publicly quoted at 1M@10.01 bid, 1M@10.03 ask. For sake of simplification, assume sub-penny pricing is not accepted in the jurisdiction where XYZ is listed. ...

16

An alternative approach is to size your bet to maximize your expected utility, which is assumed to be given by a function $u(w)$ of your total wealth $w$. This could be a better approach than using the Kelly criterion, because the Kelly fraction gives the amount to bet if you want to maximize your long-term growth rate, assuming that you will bet a large ...

15

I can think of an application in options pricing. I came across the following paper a long time ago but think it explains FT very eloquently as applied to pricing options under BS: http://maxmatsuda.com/Papers/2004/Matsuda%20Intro%20FT%20Pricing.pdf The fun starts on page 112 but it relies on the 1998 paper by Madan and Carr. What I like about the paper ...

15

QuantConnect provides an open-source, community-driven project called Lean. The project has thousands of engineers using it to create event-driven strategies, on any resolution data, any market, or asset class. Our system models margin leverage and margin calls, cash limitations, transaction costs. We maintain a full cashbook of your currencies. It's about ...

13

Here's a way to think about it: imagine you can do something in an ASIC (i.e. directly in hardware). However, the process of fabrication is in itself expensive, and you get a design that you cannot change afterwards. ASICs make sense for predefined tasks such as Bitcoin mining, well-known data processing algorithms, etc. On the other hand we have ordinary ...

13

I would say that most ML methods risk overfitting and it depends very much on the asset class. The only area where more sophisticated ML methods such as deep learning appear to make a major difference is in cash equities, where the feature space is very rich (NLP, news and announcements, corporate earnings, other financials) and the data is relatively good, ...

12

Sniffing (or stalking) algo indeed detects other algorithms. How does that work in practice? Imagine the order book for a particular equity is: Bid 1 = 99 (size 10,000), Bid 2 = 98 (size 25,000), Bid 3 = 97 (size 30,000), Offer 1 = 101 (size 10,000), Offer 2 = 102 (size 25,000), Offer 3 = 103 (size 30,000). So in the example above, the bids and offers are ...

11

I found this solid overview of different trading algorithms by Deutsche Bank Research: Trade execution algorithms Designed to minimise the price impact of executing trades of large volumes by ‘shredding’ orders into smaller parcels and slowly releasing these into the market. Strategy implementation algorithms Designed to read real-time market data and ...

11

Among matching rule, do not forget "auction calls", in most markets, you have one at the open and one at the close. To give you the main reasons to use one matching engine rather than another: Auction calls (i.e. fixings) are good to digest a lot of orders in a very short amount of time. It is why after a trading suspension, the trading starts with an ...

11

A public order book gives traders information not only on the current price of a security, but also the volume and structure of the entire supply and demand schedule. Such information can be used for arbitrage and market manipulation strategies in various ways: Spoofing: Inserting a large limit order as an apparent buy or sell signal which is canceled any ...

11

In January 2020, Matteo Aquilina, Eric Budish, and Peter O’Neill from Britain's Financial Conduct Authority published this study, illustrating how "low latency" market participants can make money off of others. I suggest you read it, because it's very clearly written for the general public, and explains how markets work. I will first oversimplify ...

11

Is there a typical "half-life" of a strategy? This is a really subjective question, and I don't think any singular answer will generalize well. That being said, I will give some examples from personal experience. I have made hundreds of trading models in my career. I have only deployed 9 into live trading in the last ~25 years. Of those 9, 2 of ...

10

I am not sure Dark Pools (DP) have been created to avoid "market manipulation". They have been created by firms because they found an advantage to create them (see Market Microstructure in Practice, L and Laruelle Eds.). The main reasons have been: spare market fees, for DP created by brokers (like UBS MTF); spare market impact, for block pools (like ITG/...

10

The Kelly criterion gives the fraction, $f$, of the current bankroll to bet in order to maximize the longterm growth. The criterion is given by $$f = \frac{bp-q}{b},$$ where $b$ is the winnings received on \$1 bet,$p$is the probability of winning, and$q=1-p$is the probability of losing the bet of \$1. In your case $b=2$, $p=q=0.5$ so the optimal ...

10

Since the stock is listed on NASDAQ, you have access to fairly standard 10Q and 10K financial statements. So you can apply the analysis pioneered by Ed Altman in his Z-score paper - compare this company's fundamental ratios with those of other companies, and see how many of them went bankrupt historically. For example, Moody's KMV uses this approach to ...

9

To answer your questions we have to take a look to what it does. PCA is mathematically defined as an orthogonal linear transformation that transforms the data to a new coordinate system, such that news vectors are orthogonals and explain the main part of the variance of the first set. It took an N x M matrice as input, N represents the differents ...

9

First we have to clarify what we mean by profits: I think your question can only address the fact that some human traders beat the market (because you also make profit by just buying the market, e.g. through an ETF). I think there are two, perhaps even three main sources: Randomness, luck (as @PerAlexandersson) correctly pointed out - financial markets are ...

9

Pete's seven year old answer is just as relevant now as it was in 2011. None of the limiting factors of their API has changed since then, so this is essentially an extensive reiteration. The Interactive Brokers API is not suitable for high frequency trading execution. However the main reason that this is the case is not necessarily what would come to mind ...

9

I have been told: Bankruptcy is very controversial Google Scholar Researchers. You might track companies ratios (e.g., debt to equity ratio, EPS, net income, cash per share (cash/sh), etc.). For instance, GE looks almost bankrupt. But, it is not and there is a very low probability that GE would file for any bankruptcy chapter, I'm just guessing. There ...

8

The main application I know of is in option pricing. Peter Carr has done some research here. For an introductory article see this one: Option valuation using the fast Fourier transform by Peter Carr and Dilip B. Madan: In this paper the authors show how the fast Fourier transform may be used to value options when the characteristic function of the ...

8

The "correct" way is the way best suited to your trading. Regardless as to your data structure of choice, you have to maintain a list of all orders active on your book. That's because subsequent messages reference Order ID and you have to look up the corresponding order to determine the price level being acted upon. Given that you have to maintain a ...

8

Of course, optimal control is at the core of math finance. Take few applications: Option Pricing: you have an exposure to a time dependent combination of market factors; you have some knowledge of their dynamics. They are partly deterministic, partly stochastic (i.e. random). At each "time step" you can adjust your portfolio at a given cost. Your goal is to ...

8

Your question is twofold How a market maker should adjust its quotes on a vol surface with respect to his inventory? How to adjust the vol surface when a new trade is observed on the markets? Let me focus on the market making question, and that for you need to be familiar with optimal trading and optimal market making literature: A breakthrough has been ...

8

As @chrisaycock mentioned, there's many permutations of parameters, especially when it comes to venue routing instructions, so it's hard to write an exhaustive list. But most of the time, the exceptions you're looking for will fall into 4 categories. 1. Intermarket sweep orders (ISOs) This allows a destination trading center to execute against other orders ...

8

You would definitely have some advantage. High Frequency Trading is all about speed and the fastest traders wins. Oftentimes, winner takes all. The blog Sniper in Mahwah & friends digs into the state of the art of inter-exchange communication. The current state of art for reliable broadband connections are microwave dishes between major trading hubs such ...

7

Your first definition is wrong; I'm not sure where you got that from. Your second definition is correct: the ISO alerts the exchange that the submitting party has taken responsibility for RegNMS and requests a fill at only that venue's price; there is no routing away. Obviously, there is a huge red-tape burden to get permission to do this.

7

As the problem is currently formulated, you have a binary decision (whether to buy the cards or not) and a single state variable (your current wealth). I'm assuming the deck is reshuffled every play. A policy function will be a function $f: \mathbb{R} \rightarrow \{0, 1\}$ that will say whether to buy or not buy the cards as a function of your wealth. How ...

6

Everyone can do what HFTs do, if they spend the necessary time and money to build and run the infrastructure required. This may involve becoming a regulated broker/dealer, but it is in no way an invite-only club. Now, to your specific question, you'll find some information on Haim Bodek's site. Bodek does content that ISO's and Day ISOs are used to gain ...

6

I have created some Fourier Analysis of stocks here: http://www.gregthatcher.com/Stocks/Default.aspx I turn the raw data into a series of sines and cosines, show the Fourier approximation as a graph, and then allow you to "turn off" the various sines and cosines, so that you can see how the various "frequencies" contribute to the graph of the stocks values. ...

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