Papers

Financial markets alternate between periods of relative stability and instability, with structural breaks marking the transitions between these regimes. Identifying such breaks in real time is a central requirement for any trading or risk system operating at high frequency. This report studies Bayesian Online Changepoint Detection (BOCPD) and two extensions proposed in the literature, and applies them to the signed order flow of NASDAQ-listed equities.

Understanding the joint dynamics of prices and trades is central to market microstructure, where returns and order flow interact through nonlinear and state-dependent mechanisms. Linear models are interpretable but may miss these effects, while deep neural networks improve forecasting at the cost of transparency. We use neural networks as tools for structural discovery rather than only for prediction. A deep feed-forward network is trained on high-frequency returns and signed volumes for large- and small-tick stocks and compared with a linear VAR benchmark. The neural network improves predictive performance, especially for returns, revealing nonlinear dependencies beyond the linear specification. Using Shapley-based explainability, we show that the dominant contributions are concentrated at the most recent lags. Model-implied responses are consistent with conditional averages reconstructed from the data. Unlike empirical averages, however, the neural-network decomposition isolates individual regressor contributions to the aggregate dependence. Lagged signed volume generates sign-preserving and saturating effects, consistent with nonlinear price impact and order-flow persistence. Lagged returns act as state variables: when the previous trade does not move the price, the model predicts continuation in the direction of past order flow, whereas non-zero returns generate attenuation or reversal. Building on these findings, we introduce a parsimonious SHAP-inspired nonlinear parametric model. It reproduces the main return-volume dependencies, outperforms the linear VAR benchmark, and achieves performance comparable to the neural network. A multi-lag extension captures residual longer-memory effects while preserving interpretability. Overall, explainability offers a route from black-box prediction to economically meaningful parametric models of price and trade dynamics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) now supports investment workflows from data and prediction through research, portfolios, execution, and tool use. Technical capability, however, is not evidence of investment profitability. This critical state-of-the-art review examines public research available through 31 August 2026 on listed equities, exchange-traded funds, centralized crypto spot, perpetual futures, and on-chain markets. We organize evidence with an alpha-translation chain: point-in-time information must yield a stable signal, feasible positions, executable orders, and risk-adjusted returns after costs. Across machine learning, time-series foundation models, financial language models, reinforcement learning, and agents, the examined record shows real but mainly upstream progress in prediction, text processing, portfolio design, and workflow integration. Evidence is thinner for durable net performance. Temporal contamination, repeated selection, survivorship, weak benchmarks, implementation costs, venue mechanics, and capacity can break translation to net alpha. Strong historical results coexist with predictor decay, corrected look-ahead failures, mixed prospective evidence, and few audited live-capital records. Crypto adds informative state but requires separate treatment of spot, perpetual, and decentralized cash flows and execution. Within the public evidence examined here, no general AI architecture is shown to deliver persistent, cross-regime, capacity-aware net alpha. More credible claims require point-in-time data and models, decision-aligned objectives, joint portfolio–execution evaluation, controlled adaptation, prospective tests, and authority-matched governance. These conditions can improve evidence and implementation; they do not guarantee profit.

Although market participants generally have access to a common information set, they make decisions based on forecasts formed over heterogeneous horizons. Because market impact depends on aggregate positions rather than trader identities, these decisions feed back into prices through their collective effect. We introduce a linear mean-field model of this interaction. The observed price is decomposed into a martingale component, a common predictable signal represented by a Volterra process, and the market impact generated by aggregate positions. Agents take positions according to conditional forecasts of future signal increments and a fraction of anticipated aggregate impact over their respective horizons. Within a Gaussian-Volterra framework, we characterize equilibrium through a linear fixed-point equation for aggregate positions and establish existence and uniqueness under explicit conditions. At equilibrium, we identify a balance condition that cancels the direct transmission of the common signal to the observed price. We then study the limit in which agents fully account for market impact. Along a suitably scaled family of equilibria satisfying explicit conditions, the contributions of the predictable signal and the market impact cancel in the limit, and the observed price converges to its martingale component. For fractional-type signals and Gamma-distributed horizons, we further derive local Hölder bounds and identify the horizon distributions for which the observed price has local regularity compatible with that of Brownian motion.

Transient impact models compose a nonlinearity with a memory kernel, and the order of composition determines the criterion for absence of price manipulation. We classify both orders. If an arbitrary instantaneous law $f$ acts on the trading rate before any nonzero integrable Volterra kernel, nonnegative cost on every finite piecewise-constant round trip forces $f$ to be affine, and linear for every nonzero convolution kernel. In particular, the power law $\mathrm{sgn}(x)|x|^\delta$, $\delta>0$, combined with power-law decay $t^{-\gamma}$, $0<\gamma<1$, admits manipulation if and only if $\delta\ne1$: square-root impact is manipulable at every decay exponent, and the region left open by Gatheral's slow-rate two-block bound $\delta+\gamma\ge1$ collapses to the line $\delta=1$. Earlier rigidity theorems require a kernel that is bounded at zero; the argument here is a zero-volume chattering pump read out by two thin baseline trades, and it applies to singular kernels. If instead a monotone readout acts on the impact state after the kernel, safety for all inputs and all readouts is equivalent to complete positivity of the kernel, with a constructive converse; in particular, square-root impact after power-law memory is manipulation-free. A remote compensating block shows that round-trip safety and all-input safety coincide for kernels with uniformly vanishing tails and differ, for permanent memory, by an explicit storage quotient. These mechanisms classify every two-mode Prony kernel, first-order time-inhomogeneous memory, and stable fully actuated matrix memory, and they quantify the friction, the two-block phase, and the switching complexity behind the power-law case. Calibrated exponent pairs all lie in the manipulable set: absent friction, concavity has to enter after the memory, not before it.

Market-order flow in financial markets exhibits long-range correlations. This is a widely known stylised fact of financial markets. A popular hypothesis for this stylised fact comes from the Lillo-Mike-Farmer (LMF) order-splitting theory. However, quantitative tests of this theory have historically relied on proprietary datasets with trader identifiers, limiting reproducibility and cross-market validation. We investigate whether it can be recovered from anonymous public data using synthetic metaorder reconstruction. Using transaction and quote data for the largest 239 stocks by market capitalisation on the JSE as of 13 March 2026 with the data range being 1 January 2023 until 31 December 2025, we conduct a grid search over reconstruction parameters and evaluate each configuration against established metaorder stylised facts and the LMF relation. Configurations selected to minimise errors across the metaorder impact stylised facts reproduce the targeted aggregate properties but yield a poor LMF relation. Configurations selected to minimise the LMF discrepancy recover the relation by construction while retaining several broad impact features, although some stock-level execution and decay fits are weaker. These asymmetric results show that recovering aggregate impact stylised facts alone is insufficient to identify LMF-consistent order splitting, while the LMF-targeted result establishes compatibility within the reconstruction class rather than an independent test. The findings support consistency with, rather than direct validation of, the LMF theory using anonymous market data.

Loss-versus-Rebalancing (LVR) is the dominant adverse-selection cost borne by liquidity providers on automated market makers. Under geometric Brownian motion, arbitrage profit scales with the probability of a profitable block, which vanishes as the block time $\Delta t \to 0$; this is the standing argument for ever-shorter blocks. Modeling the reference price instead as a jump-diffusion, I show that the constant-product LVR rate splits into a diffusion channel carrying the known multiplier $F(\gamma/(\sigma\sqrt{\Delta t}))$ and a jump channel $\lambda V \cdot G(\gamma;m,\delta^2)$ carrying no $\Delta t$, the two interacting only through an explicitly bounded remainder. The block schedule therefore governs only one channel. For symmetric jump laws the jump channel is moreover an exact lower bound, $\ell(\Delta t) \ge \lambda V G > 0$, so the rate does not vanish as $\Delta t \to 0$, and descends slowly, as $\sqrt{\Delta t}$. At Ethereum's calibrated 12-second slot the rate is 471 bp/yr against a floor of 125, so only three quarters of LP loss is schedule-addressable. At Solana's 400 ms slot the jump channel already dominates. Netting the rate against per-block consensus cost, the LP-side optimal block time is invariant in pool size and in every jump parameter $(\lambda,m,\delta)$: jumps shift the level of LP loss but not the planner's marginal tradeoff. Volatility, the fee tier, and consensus cost set the optimum, near 8 s. However, LVR is only one input to block-time welfare, so this bounds the LP-side contribution rather than settling the design question.

We study the quadratic tracking problem of a general stochastic target process with absolutely continuous controls, with and without terminal constraint. We derive explicit, non-asymptotic upper bounds in terms of a Besov-type modulus of the target. These bounds yield sharp explicit rates that specialize to the square-root order for semimartingale targets. We then apply these results to a generalized Obizhaeva–Wang execution model with random terminal inventory. We first develop a Hilbert-space approach to characterize its optimal strategy, which includes jumps. To avoid such trading spikes, one regularizes the problem by a quadratic trading-rate penalty with coefficient $\varepsilon$. We then show that the regularized optimal execution cost—and therefore the excess price impact cost of the regularized optimal strategy—converges at the sharp rate $O(\sqrt{\varepsilon})$. Since the regularized optimal strategy is not available in closed form, we further construct a nearly optimal strategy which is readily implementable and shares the same approximation rate.

In financial markets, a sequential policy that reacts systematically to price movements may become predictable to other market participants. This paper studies whether large language model (LLM) agents exhibit such directional structure through RetailAgent, an experimental framework in which an LLM observes anonymized intraday equity price histories and permitted state, then repeatedly chooses long (hold the stock) or flat (stay out) before the subsequent interval return is revealed. We compare returns during long and flat intervals along the same stock's intraday path after removing the overall fraction of long decisions. This exposure-matched measure reveals persistent negative timing across modality, horizon, state, and model family. Shuffling saved action sequences substantially attenuates the effect, showing that alignment between actions and subsequent returns drives the negative score. Feeding self-authored memories into decisions further increases policy persistence, while timing becomes more negative among stock-days on which the agent uses both actions. These results reveal stable, recoverable directional structure in sequential LLM financial decisions and a behavioral signal for studying how another participant could respond to a predictable policy.

Algorithmic trading now represents a market exceeding $20 billion, where even marginal gains in signal robustness can translate into economically significant returns. Existing evaluations of equity prediction models do not explicitly target regime robustness during hyperparameter selection. Five model classes are trained on daily observations from approximately 300 large-cap US equities over eleven years, with Bayesian optimisation configured to target trading performance across three statistically different market regimes. Regime-robust hyperparameter selection is associated with out-of-sample generalisation, as signal precision remains above the random baseline across all four quarters of the test period, and portfolio performance slowly degrades under simulated input noise before collapsing beyond a defined threshold. No individual tabular deep learning architecture outperforms gradient-boosted trees, but combining XGBoost and TabNet using rank aggregation produces a Hybrid ensemble with an annualised return of 51.26%, a Sharpe ratio of 2.44, and a statistically significant CAPM alpha of 0.423 (p = 0.011). A near-zero beta indicates this outperformance is driven by stock selection, not market exposure. Alternative data plays a secondary role once technical and fundamental features are accounted for, as well as contributing more strongly on the short side than the long, and varies by model class. An interactive application makes these results explorable in real time, with live data integration the remaining step toward practical deployment.

Coupled feedback networks are often monitored channel by channel even though cross-channel paths alter both stability margins and transmitted disturbances. We study identification of a structured feedback matrix L_t = Phi diag(gamma_t) in an output-only setting: no commanded, probing, or reference input exists – only temporally separated outputs and the scheduling gains gamma_t are observed, while the coupling response Phi and the clearing-window inputs are not. Identification rests jointly on the persistent excitation of the observed pre-window output and on two structural features separating coupling from confounds: the known time variation of the gains, which modulates the closed-loop response in a predictable pattern, and a partial-reversal moment by which a known fraction of transient displacement is corrected in a subsequent window. We give a hierarchy of results: exact local identification of the coupling under a Jacobian rank condition on the gain regimes; a first-order interaction estimator whose identification strength is the minimum eigenvalue of the residualized interaction information matrix (provably unidentified under constant gains); and a characterization of the estimand as a resolvent sensitivity – the right object for screening transmitted disturbances and a first-stage input to spectral-margin recovery – with sqrt(T) asymptotics for the first-order estimator, a cross-identification theorem mapping each varying gain to exactly identified resolvent rows and columns, and bootstrap validity under consistent selection; the implemented heuristic's empirical coverage (90% at nominal 95%) quantifies the remaining gap. Simulations verify sharpness of the rank condition and quantify benchmark failures under confounding. A case study on leveraged-fund rebalancing feedback, where daily fund disclosures play the role of the known gains, illustrates the method on real data.

We study equilibria in a closed, fee-free constant-function market maker (CFMM) economy with two assets and two traders. An interior state is a unilateral no-trade equilibrium exactly when the CFMM marginal price equals both traders' marginal rates of substitution. For an interior initial state, individually rational unilateral equilibria are Pareto optimal relative to the fixed CFMM invariant. A weak representative agent is obtained at each fixed equilibrium by weighted sup-convolution, whereas a state-independent strong representative agent exists exactly when traders share a common homothetic preference. Every interior feasible state is reachable through finitely many valid trades, and alternating utility-maximizing trades converge to a Pareto optimal unilateral equilibrium. We also derive conditions under which trading order produces a first-mover advantage or disadvantage in the first round.

Tick-level trade-and-quote data for the Tokyo Stock Exchange is distributed through the Nikkei NEEDS service as thousands of zipped CSV archives spanning four data types with era-dependent schemas and Japanese-language layouts. We present tse_tick, an open-source Python library that converts these raw archives into clean, typed Polars DataFrames and a Hive-partitioned Parquet store queryable through DuckDB. The library offers two access paths sharing one parse-and-clean core: a one-shot reader that returns a ticker- and time-filtered DataFrame directly from raw ZIP files, and a two-stage ingest-then-query pipeline with resume-safe, memory-aware parallel ingestion, part-pruning, and a materialized intraday time key for row-group pruning. The engineering, more than the parsing, is what the library contributes: ingestion runs in per-date atomic units whose completion is recorded by coverage markers rather than inferred from file existence, writes stream in bounded morsels so that peak memory is independent of trading-day size (24.5 GB to 2.4 GB on the worst measured day), a RAM-aware process pool sizes itself to available memory, and part-pruning opens only the archive parts a ticker can occupy. Full English and Japanese column definitions ship for all four types, and a translation layer maps yfinance, Polygon, and ccxt names onto their tse_tick equivalents. In benchmarks on a commodity 16-thread workstation, parsing a representative 4.8-million-row archive part, one of a trading day's nine parts, is 59.8x faster than the original pandas prototype (34.3x against an engine-matched pandas baseline), and a single-ticker time-window query from the store completes roughly 410x faster than a pandas scan of the equivalent CSV. tse_tick is available on PyPI (pip install tse-tick) under the MIT license.

The stability of markets hosting leveraged exchange-traded products is governed not by any single product's loop gain but by the spectral radius of a loop-gain matrix, and scalar per-product monitoring underestimates system feedback by construction. Recent work measures the self-reinforcement of a leveraged fund's daily close rebalancing through a scalar loop gain and treats cross-asset spillovers as bias. We model complexes on correlated underlyings as a coupled feedback system with matrix gain L and show that scalar monitoring has two blind spots: (i) cycle amplification, since rho(L) >= max_i l_ii for nonnegative coupling, strict under two-way coupling; and (ii) transmitted displacement, which arises already under one-way coupling and is invisible to the receiver's own gain. We give a reduced-form estimator of L requiring only prices and public fund assets – no signed order flow – via cross-asset overnight reversals, reporting its measurement-convention sensitivity explicitly. In simulation the spectral radius is recovered with RMSE 0.005 at T=250, a lead-lag confounder yields a 2% false-alarm rate, and in a calibrated blind-spot configuration the scalar monitor reports "safe" and the matrix monitor "unsafe" on 100% of paths. In the 2026 Korean single-stock LETF episode we detect transmission from the SK Hynix complex into Samsung Electronics' closing price (DiD z=-2.82; exact randomization p=0.0055 against 182 control pairs), scaling with the sender's rebalancing capital; conservatively, about 41% of Samsung's closing displacement variance is imported – invisible to its own "moderate" gain of 0.24. The same estimator returns nulls for the U.S. MSTR-Bitcoin-Coinbase complex, whose capital is comparable but whose closing venue is far deeper. Monitoring should be organized around the (complex x venue) matrix, not around products.

At 15-minute horizons, directional mean reversion is far stronger and more pervasive in cryptocurrency markets than in US equities: scored under one matched, strictly out-of-sample protocol, 90% of 183 Binance pairs carry significant directional reversal against 2.7% of 187 US stocks and ETFs, in every focal coin-year since 2021. The signal lives in signs, not magnitudes: lag-one return autocorrelation is near zero on the major coins, yet simply betting against the previous candle captures most of the effect. US-listed funds whose net asset value is a crypto or metal price inherit their underlying's reversal, including its absence, from their first months of trading; stocks merely correlated with the same underlyings inherit nothing: descriptive evidence that a wrapper's tape reads like the process it wraps, not the venue it prints on. On the originating tape, the reversal concentrates after moves driven by aggressive taker flow and grows with flow intensity, while the order-book depth a move consumes conditions nothing: a conditioning consistent with compensated liquidity provision, not a test that selects it. The gross edge peaks near 1.3 bp per trade against a 5 bp round-trip cost: large enough to detect, too small to clear benchmark spot capture costs. The contrast survives an artifact battery, an exact permutation null, and a frozen six-month holdout, with a class-mean AUC gap of +0.031 as designed and +0.011 (95% CI [+0.008, +0.014]) under the most conservative accounting, clear of zero either way.

Option-implied rates are often treated as frictionless because completed boxes deliver riskless payoffs. I show that this interpretation requires option- and benchmark-side implementation wedges to offset. Using SPX and RUT options from 2012-2025, I find a 2-3 bp unannualized increase in the option funding basis when maturity first crosses December 31. The effect behaves as a fixed price wedge, strengthens in the mid-2010s, survives alternative contracts and benchmarks, appears independently in government-bond CIP, and is reproduced in an independently constructed option panel. Put-call parity can identify discount rates precisely without establishing their economic purity.

Automated market makers (AMMs) are a cornerstone of decentralised finance (DeFi). Constant product markets with concentrated liquidity, such as UniswapV3, are now a well-established design. In these markets, liquidity providers (LPs) face a sequential decision problem: they must decide when to rebalance their positions and which price ranges to allocate capital to as market conditions evolve. We formulate dynamic liquidity provision as a stochastic impulse control problem and use reinforcement learning (RL) to solve it, focusing on providing interpretable solutions. We show that learned policies exhibit rich state-dependent behaviour, allocating liquidity according to mispricing, rebalancing costs, uncertainty, inventory exposure, and heterogeneous risk preferences. These behaviours help compress the left tail of the Profit and Loss (PnL) distribution and avoid catastrophic outcomes under high uncertainty. Finally, we benchmark the RL agents against baseline and sophisticated agents from the AMM microstructure literature and analyse their performance.

Optimal execution (OE) in multi-asset settings involves complex interactions across assets, particularly through shared capital constraints during portfolio rebalancing. While existing models capture cross-impact and portfolio-level dynamics, they largely overlook the role of explicit cash constraints along the execution trajectory. As a result, the feasibility of execution strategies under limited capital remains poorly understood. In this paper, we extend the classical Almgren-Chriss framework to incorporate intertemporal constraints on expected cash consumption, requiring that the expected cumulative cash spent does not exceed a prescribed budget at every trading period. We show that the resulting multi-asset OE problem can be equivalently formulated as a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP), and further establish that it admits a convex representation under mild conditions. This provides a tractable framework for analyzing execution strategies under dynamic capital constraints. Through controlled synthetic experiments, we show that the proposed cash constraints qualitatively alter OE schedules toward cash-feasible sell-first executions as the constraints become tighter. Furthermore, evaluations in an out-of-sample agent-based market simulator demonstrate that our method substantially reduces peak cash drawdown while maintaining implementation shortfall comparable to existing execution strategies. Our results highlight the importance of explicitly modeling financial feasibility in multi-asset execution and provide a foundation for bridging theoretical OE models with practical capital constraints.

We introduce a reinforcement learning framework for market making in a limit order book. Our algorithm aims to maximize trading revenue by dynamically submitting market and limit orders of varying sizes across multiple price levels while controlling inventory size. We use multivariate logistic-normal distributions to model order allocations and employ a deep-set encoder to aggregate features from variable-length order sets into a fixed-dimensional latent representation. Additionally, we incorporate potential-based reward shaping to accelerate learning without altering the optimal policy. We illustrate the performance of the method in three simulated market environments consisting of noise traders who submit random trades, tactical traders who respond to instantaneous volume imbalance, and strategic traders who trade in the direction of an exponentially weighted volume imbalance signal.

We study the blockchain censorship attack introduced in [21], which shows that joining the attack is a dominant strategy. We show that, by introducing certain detectability threshold, joining the attack can lead to strictly less reward for whales, which are defined to be a small number of validators that hold significantly more voting power than the rest (henceforth known as minnows). This leads to a change of the equilibrium: With whales unwilling to participate in the attack, it is difficult for minnows alone to launch the attack. We also perform Monte Carlo simulation to show the existence of reduction for whales' reward in Ethereum and Solana.

Limit order book (LOB) simulators are most useful to practitioners when they combine realistic market dynamics, computationally efficient sampling, controllable scenario generation, and the ability to generalize beyond the instruments seen during training—properties that existing agent-based and deep generative simulators provide only partially. We present FlowLOB, a conditional flow-matching generator of LOB trajectories, trained on multiple Hong Kong Exchange (HKEX) symbols at three sampling frequencies ($0.1$s, $1$s, $10$s) in tick-relative representation that transfers to unseen instruments. Because flow and diffusion models admit a common formulation, we train both with identical data, architecture, and budget, and sample both through the same fixed-step ODE solvers, yielding a controlled comparison of sampling efficiency and fidelity. Flow matching attains its best quality with only $10$ ODE-solver steps, whereas diffusion needs many more function evaluations to approach the same fidelity. At this efficient operating point, FlowLOB improves realism over baselines, two learned and two agent-based models, in most distributional metrics at the two finer sampling frequencies. We evaluate counterfactual controllability with a distributional test that asks whether changing a scenario condition moves the generated statistic toward the corresponding real tail regime; FlowLOB satisfies this criterion in most tested settings. Both realism and control effects transfer zero-shot on a held-out symbol. We additionally conduct ablation studies on the network architecture and the learning rate.

Crypto-listed equity perpetuals trade while the primary cash market is closed, yet still need a mark for margin, funding, and liquidation. We model the closed-window mark as the fixed point of an oracle operator with two blocks: external anchoring and self/peer derivative reference. From marks and proxies alone the two are observationally equivalent: every reduced form admits infinitely many topology decompositions, and a path-law argument extends this to the full mark dynamics, so lead-lag and information-share estimators have power equal to size. Disclosure breaks the tie – disclosed diagonal adjustment identifies the normalized topology, and disclosed support with forbidden anchors gives a row-level test that identifies, falsifies, or leaves a positive-dimensional class under a rank condition and finite-sample tolerance. Empirically, a disclosed OKX row survives pre-open falsification while a pure-external baseline shows the test's limited power, and an eight-week deep-closed panel with cash-reopen validation bounds the live-external content of closure variance. Cross-venue agreement is not price discovery unless disclosure or the cash reopen breaks the equivalence class.

The daily return of a stock is often restricted to an exchange-imposed band to curb extreme fluctuations. Any attempted price movement beyond this band is clipped, leaving an unobserved excess. We introduce a minimal stochastic latent-state model in which a fraction of this hidden excess is retained for the next day. This retention generates memory, even though the daily stochastic driving shocks are independent. For symmetric driving shocks with regularly varying tails, the stationary latent return preserves the tail index of the noise, but has an enhanced tail amplitude. In the wide-band limit, a close of the daily return at either limit of the band admits a single-dominant-shock description. We show that after such an event, the mean return on the following day has the same sign and grows proportionally to the band width, while the probability of reaching the same limit again approaches a finite value. Reaching the opposite band limit on the following day requires a second extreme shock of opposite sign and is power-law suppressed. Simulations support these analytical predictions. Empirical data from stocks subject to daily price limits are qualitatively consistent with the predicted same-sign response and its increase across wider price bands.

Hawkes-based microstructural foundations for rough volatility, leverage, and rough Heston-type limits were developed by El Euch et al. (2018, Finance Stoch., 22(2), 241–280) and connected to the affine rough Heston framework of El Euch and Rosenbaum (2019, Math. Finance, 29(1), 3–38). The rough Hawkes–Heston model with common price–volatility jumps of Bondi et al. (2024, Math. Finance, 34(4), 1197–1241) extends this framework by adding state-dependent common jumps to rough affine volatility. We provide a microstructural foundation for its variance and common-jump mechanism by constructing a Poisson-embedded marked Hawkes order-flow model. Ordinary arrivals generate rough continuous volatility and leverage through a nearly unstable heavy-tailed Hawkes mechanism, while rare marked arrivals represent common shock events that produce simultaneous price jumps and volatility excitation. Under the nearly unstable scaling and the reduced-form admissibility conditions, the complete rescaled price/variance/jump system converges along the full sequence to the unique complete canonical rough Hawkes–Heston weak solution. The Hawkes renewal structure yields a Mittag–Leffler Volterra representation, which is then rewritten in Riemann–Liouville fractional form. The limiting coefficients are expressed explicitly in terms of the microscopic parameters. The construction provides a microstructural foundation for the variance and common-jump mechanism of the rough Hawkes–Heston model. Numerical experiments illustrate the convergence of our microstructural foundation to the rough Hawkes-Heston model.

We consider a market maker who can only obtain and dispose of inventory by responding to a sequence of sealed-bid enquiries, and whose customers arrive with imbalanced intent: sellers more often than buyers, or the reverse. Under the assumption that the best competing response is exponentially distributed around a commonly discerned fair price, we observe a symmetry in the steady state solution that compresses the imbalanced problem onto the perfectly balanced one. Order imbalance is absorbed, exactly, by a translation of the market maker's skew, a widening of her quotes, and a multiplication of her effective cost of carry. The adjustment is simple even though the solution it adjusts is not, and it involves no free parameter beyond the observable market width. The exponential assumption is needed only locally, at the quotes actually made, and the width that enters is the locally observed one. Among the consequences: a market maker with zero inventory should still skew; skew responds to imbalance at first order whereas width responds only at second order; and the popular "constant width, linear skew" heuristic is recovered as the small-skew solution in the special case of balanced flow and quadratic holding cost.

Intraday market manipulation is hard to detect because its footprint is brief, buried in millions of quotes, and statistically similar to ordinary volatility. Detectors reach high recall only by flagging so many other days that measured precision collapses, producing alerts no regulator can act on. We show that this manipulation leaves a distinctive dynamic signature: a pump-and-crash pattern visible in the velocity of market state, rather than its level. We build a minute-level detection pipeline, strictly partitioned in time, based on smoothed state velocity: option-Delta velocity for index options and price velocity for equities. We explain every alert with SHAP attribution. We hold the test period strictly out-of-sample and fix all thresholds before evaluation. On the locked Indian BANKNIFTY index-options test, the plain autoencoder recovers 10 of 10 regulator-identified manipulation days. Conditioning detection on market regimes inferred by a hidden Markov model yields an instructive negative result. The regimes are descriptively distinct, but using them trades recall for precision. Under the closed-world assumption that unlabeled days are normal, precision remains near 25%. The same dynamic appears in thinly traded U.S. equities (SEC v. Patel). The shape of the signature survives the transfer; its velocity magnitude does not. A pump-reversal shape score ranks the complaint's alleged manipulation days with AUC 0.91 (ARQQ) and 0.81 (ACY). On the ARQQ worked example, the score peaks inside the complaint's documented minute window. Finally, exact SHAP attribution over every alert shows that unconfirmed alerts share the regulator-identified days' attribution profile (cosine similarity 0.99). The precision ceiling is consistent with incomplete enforcement labels rather than detector failure. What transfers across markets and instrument types is the dynamic signature itself.

Informed traders are supposed to need anonymity: they profit by hiding among the uninformed. A decentralized exchange now publishes the counterparty. Every committed order, cancellation, rejection, and fill carries a persistent pseudonymous wallet address. We reconstruct the full-depth limit order book from a record of 17.1 billion messages and 14.3 million aggressive orders by 147,113 wallets, covering $84.3 billion in taker notional. We report three findings. First, informativeness is a persistent wallet attribute. Wallets ranked by the price movement following their aggressive orders retain that ordering across adjacent ten-day windows, with a rank correlation of 0.52. Second, the ranking predicts returns. Adding the live activity of the highest-ranked wallets to a standard anonymous benchmark of prices, quotes, and order flow raises the out-of-sample R2 for one-second returns to 12.31%, a 13.2% gain (t = 9.2) that is 1.6 times the largest of 200 activity-matched placebo cohorts. Third, measured at realized trades rather than at every sampled moment, the increment grows from 1.43 to 2.47 percentage points of R2. Public wallet histories therefore carry short-horizon price information that anonymous order-book data leave unmeasured.

Automated market makers (AMMs) are typically interpreted and evaluated as decentralized exchanges. Herein, we take the perspective envisioned by Balancer that an AMM can also be viewed as a portfolio technology that programmatically enforces an economic mandate. In particular, we follow the geometric mean market maker (G3M) invariant employed by that protocol in order to enforce a target-weighted portfolio. We introduce a multi-asset fee structure to the G3M under which competitive arbitrage implements a band-rebalancing strategy with mis-weighting bounded ex ante, allowing compliance with the mandate to be verified directly from the pool's observable holdings. We then compare simulated G3M portfolios against the realized performance of VBIAX, EQL, and EDOW on annualized returns and tracking error against the portfolio mandate. Across these historical case studies, and using arbitrage-only order flow, the G3M is found to outperform the incumbent funds in both metrics for certain fee ranges.