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Journal of Banking & Finance Vol. 72 2016

Chasing trends at the micro-level: The effect of technical trading on order book dynamics

Carl Chiarella1; Daniel Ladley2

1 University of Technology Sydney · 2 University of Leicester

open access

Abstract

Technical traders attempt to exploit trends in market prices and the order flow. Despite this little is known about how these traders behave in a micro-structure context. We consider a model of an order book based financial market. The market contains two groups: informed traders and technical traders. A numerical technique is used to identify a Markov perfect equilibrium of the trading game and so determine the optimal strategies. We find that technical trading rules are profitable and allow traders to increase their returns. The effect of technical traders on the market, however, is ambiguous. They decrease volatility and pricing errors but also increase trading costs despite primarily acting as liquidity suppliers.

DOI
10.1016/j.jbankfin.2015.11.019
Volume
72
Pages
S119-S131
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref bibtex:phds-export.bib

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