This paper analyzes information acquisition in double auction markets and shows that for any finite information cost, if the number of traders and the units a trader is allowed to trade are sufficiently large, then an efficient equilibrium allocation fails to exist. For a large set of parameter values any equilibrium with positive volume of trade has the following properties. Ex ante identicall...

Financial engineering such as trading decision is an emerging research area and also has great commercial potentials. A successful stock buying/selling generally occurs near price trend turning point. Traditional technical analysis relies on some statistics (i.e. technical indicators) to predict turning point of the trend. However, these indicators can not guarantee the accuracy of prediction i...

This article constructs an economic model of a rational trader who operates in a market with transaction costs and noise trading. The level of trading affects the rational trader’s marginal cost of transacting; as a result, trading volume (through its effect on marginal cost) is a source of risk. This engenders an equilibrium relationship between returns and volume. The model also provides a si...

We discuss when and why custom multi-factor risk models are warranted and give source code for computing some risk factors. Pension/mutual funds do not require customization but standardization. However, using standardized risk models in quant trading with much shorter holding horizons is suboptimal: (1) longer horizon risk factors (value, growth, etc.) increase noise trades and trading costs; ...

In asymmetric information models of financial markets, prices imperfectly reveal the private information held by traders. Informed insiders thus have an incentive not only to trade less aggressively but also to manipulate the market by trading in the wrong direction and undertaking short term losses, so as to ‘confuse’ the market and increase the noise in the trading process. In this paper we s...

A deterministic trading strategy can be regarded as a signal processing element that uses external information and past prices as inputs and incorporates them into future prices. This paper uses a market maker based method of price formation to study the price dynamics induced by several commonly used financial trading strategies, showing how they amplify noise, induce structure in prices, and ...