Most modern financial markets use a continuous double auction mechanism to store and match orders and facilitate trading. In this paper we develop a microscopic dynamical statistical model for the continuous double auction under the assumption of IID random order flow, and analyse it using...

It is widely believed that fluctuations in transaction volume, as reflected in the number of transactions and to a lesser extent their size, are the main cause of clustered volatility. Under this view bursts of rapid or slow price diffusion reflect bursts of frequent or less frequent trading,...

We study the cause of large fluctuations in prices on the London Stock Exchange. This is done at the microscopic level of individual events, where an event is the placement or cancellation of an order to buy or sell. We show that price fluctuations caused by individual market orders are...

We develop a theory for the market impact of large trading orders, which we call <italic>metaorders</italic> because they are typically split into small pieces and executed incrementally. Market impact is empirically observed to be a concave function of metaorder size, i.e. the impact per share of large...

We build a simple model of leveraged asset purchases with margin calls. Investment funds use what is perhaps the most basic financial strategy, called ‘value investing’, i.e. systematically attempting to buy underpriced assets. When funds do not borrow, the price fluctuations of the asset...