Thesis Defense: Market Making with Latency

Abstract: In this thesis, we delve into the challenges of market making, the concurrent provision of buy and sell prices in financial assets. The focus is particularly on the complexities inherent in high-frequency trading scenarios, addressing optimal market making in the presence of latency, and incorporating a running inventory penalty.

The initial exploration involves the formulation of a stochastic control model that aptly captures the actions of an electronic market maker navigating a trading environment influenced by latency. The main objective of the market maker lies in the maximization of expected terminal wealth. To systematically address and resolve this control problem, we recast it into a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process, subsequently amenable to numerical solutions. A complementary avenue is explored by employing model-free Reinforcement Learning algorithms. This approach signifies a departure from traditional model-centric methods, harnessing the power of RL to adapt and optimize market-making strategies.

We finally made a novel proposal, which introduces a penalty mechanism linked to the running inventory across the entire trading horizon. The incorporation of this running inventory penalty framework significantly enhances the market maker's risk management capabilities. 

Host: Jose Figueroa-Lopez