Limit Order Strategic Placement with Adverse Selection Risk and the Role of Latency

This paper is split in three parts: first, we use labeled trade data to exhibit how market participants’ decisions depend on liquidity imbalance; then, we develop a stochastic control framework where agents monitor limit orders, by exploiting liquidity imbalance, to reduce adverse selection. For limit orders, we need optimal strategies essentially to find a balance between fast execution and avoiding adverse selection: if the price has chances to go down, the probability to be filled is high, but it is better to wait a little more to get a better price. In a third part, we show how the added value of exploiting liquidity imbalance is eroded by latency: being able to predict future liquidity consuming flows is of less use if you do not have enough time to cancel and reinsert your limit orders. There is thus a rationale for market makers to be as fast as possible to reduce adverse selection. Latency costs of our limit order driven strategy can be measured numerically. To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to make the connection between empirical evidences, a stochastic framework for limit orders including adverse selection, and the cost of latency. Our work is a first step to shed light on the role played by latency and adverse selection in optimal limit order placement.