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How markets slowly digest changes in supply and demand
In this article we revisit the classic problem of tatonnement in price
formation from a microstructure point of view, reviewing a recent body of
theoretical and empirical work explaining how fluctuations in supply and demand
are slowly incorporated into prices. Because revealed market liquidity is
extremely low, large orders to buy or sell can only be traded incrementally,
over periods of time as long as months. As a result order flow is a highly
persistent long-memory process. Maintaining compatibility with market
efficiency has profound consequences on price formation, on the dynamics of
liquidity, and on the nature of impact. We review a body of theory that makes
detailed quantitative predictions about the volume and time dependence of
market impact, the bid-ask spread, order book dynamics, and volatility.
Comparisons to data yield some encouraging successes. This framework suggests a
novel interpretation of financial information, in which agents are at best only
weakly informed and all have a similar and extremely noisy impact on prices.
Most of the processed information appears to come from supply and demand
itself, rather than from external news. The ideas reviewed here are relevant to
market microstructure regulation, agent-based models, cost-optimal execution
strategies, and understanding market ecologies.Comment: 111 pages, 24 figure
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