Fools Rush In: Competitive Effects of Reaction Time in Automated Trading

Henry Hanifan, John P Cartlidge

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference Contribution (Conference Proceeding)

1 Citation (Scopus)
213 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

We explore the competitive effects of reaction time of automated trading strategies in simulated financial markets containing a single exchange with public limit order book and continuous double auction matching. A large body of research conducted over several decades has been devoted to trading agent design and simulation, but the majority of this work focuses on pricing strategy and does not consider the time taken for these strategies to compute. In real-world financial markets, speed is known to heavily influence the design of automated trading algorithms, with the generally accepted wisdom that faster is better. Here, we introduce increasingly realistic models of trading speed and profile the computation times of a suite of eminent trading algorithms from the literature. Results demonstrate that: (a) trading performance is impacted by speed, but faster is not always better; (b) the Adaptive-Aggressive (AA) algorithm, until recently considered the most dominant trading strategy in the literature, is outperformed by the simplistic Shaver (SHVR) strategy — shave one tick off the current best bid or ask — when relative computation times are accurately simulated.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART-2020)
PublisherSciTePress
Pages82-93
Number of pages12
Volume1
ISBN (Electronic)978-989-758-395-7
ISBN (Print)978-989-758-395-7
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 18 Mar 2020
EventICAART-2020: 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Valletta, Malta
Duration: 22 Feb 202024 Feb 2020
http://www.icaart.org/

Conference

ConferenceICAART-2020: 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence
Country/TerritoryMalta
CityValletta
Period22/02/2024/02/20
Internet address

Keywords

  • Agent Based Modelling
  • Auctions
  • Automated Trading
  • Financial Markets
  • Simulation
  • Trading Agents

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Fools Rush In: Competitive Effects of Reaction Time in Automated Trading'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this