High frequency trading strategies, market fragility and price spikes: an agent based model perspective

Given recent requirements for ensuring the robustness of algorithmic trading strategies laid out in the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II, this paper proposes a novel agent-based simulation for exploring algorithmic trading strategies. Five different types of agents are present in the market. The statistical properties of the simulated market are compared with equity market depth data from the Chi-X exchange and found to be significantly similar. The model is able to reproduce a number of stylised market properties including: clustered volatility, autocorrelation of returns, long memory in order flow, concave price impact and the presence of extreme price events. The results are found to be insensitive to reasonable parameter variations

Particle filters for partially-observed diffusions.

In this paper we introduce novel particle filters for a class of partially-observed continuous-time dynamic models where the signal is given by a multivariate diffusion process. We consider a variety of observation schemes, including diffusion observed with error, observation of a subset of the components of the multivariate diffusion and arrival times of a Poisson process whose intensity is a known function of the diffusion (Cox process). Unlike currently available methods, our particle filters do not require approximations of the transition and/or the observation density using time-discretisations. Instead, they build on recent methodology for the exact simulation of the diffusion process and the unbiased estimation of the transition density as described in Beskos et al. (2006). In particular, we introduce the Generalised Poisson Estimator, which generalises the Poisson Estimator of Beskos et al. (2006). Thus, our filters avoid the systematic biases caused by time-discretisations and they have significant computational advantages over alternative continuous-time filters. These advantages are supported theoretically by a central limit theorem

Moment based regression algorithms for drift and volatility estimation in continuous-time Markov switching models

We consider a continuous time Markov switching model (MSM) which is widely used in mathematical finance. The aim is to estimate the parameters given observations in discrete time. Since there is no finite dimensional filter for estimating the underlying state of the MSM, it is not possible to compute numerically the maximum likelihood parameter estimate via the well known expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Therefore in this paper, we propose a method of moments based parameter estimator. The moments of the observed process are computed explicitly as a function of the time discretization interval of the discrete time observation process. We then propose two algorithms for parameter estimation of the MSM. The first algorithm is based on a least-squares fit to the exact moments over different time lags, while the second algorithm is based on estimating the coefficients of the expansion (with respect to time) of the moments. Extensive numerical results comparing the algorithm with the EM algorithm for the discretized model are presented. Copyright � 2008 The Authors. Journal compilation � Royal Economic Society 2008