Fundamental Issues in Automated Market Making

Abstract

The goal of this chapter is to establish an analytical foundation for electronic market making. We use two classes of models to reason about this domain: structured and relaxed. In our structured model, we will formalize the decision process of a dealer and then use a simple class of trading strategies to highlight several fundamental issues in market making. In our relaxed model, we treat the dealer’s quotes and transaction prices as a simple time series. We apply statistical techniques to discern possible structure in the data and then make conclusions about the dealer’s optimal behavior. Our main interest is a normative automation of the securities dealer’s activities, as opposed to explanatory modeling of human traders, which is the primary concern of earlier studies in this area.