Incorporating Signals into Optimal Trading

Optimal trading is a recent field of research which was initiated by Almgren, Chriss, Bertsimas and Lo in the late 90's. Its main application is slicing large trading orders, in the interest of minimizing trading costs and potential perturbations of price dynamics due to liquidity shocks. The initial optimization frameworks were based on mean-variance minimization for the trading costs. In the past 15 years, finer modelling of price dynamics, more realistic control variables and different cost functionals were developed. The inclusion of signals (i.e. short term predictors of price dynamics) in optimal trading is a recent development and it is also the subject of this work. We incorporate a Markovian signal in the optimal trading framework which was initially proposed by Gatheral, Schied, and Slynko [21] and provide results on the existence and uniqueness of an optimal trading strategy. Moreover, we derive an explicit singular optimal strategy for the special case of an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck signal and an exponentially decaying transient market impact. The combination of a mean-reverting signal along with a market impact decay is of special interest, since they affect the short term price variations in opposite directions. Later, we show that in the asymptotic limit were the transient market impact becomes instantaneous, the optimal strategy becomes continuous. This result is compatible with the optimal trading framework which was proposed by Cartea and Jaimungal [10]. In order to support our models, we analyse nine months of tick by tick data on 13 European stocks from the NASDAQ OMX exchange. We show that orderbook imbalance is a predictor of the future price move and it has some mean-reverting properties. From this data we show that market participants, especially high frequency traders, use this signal in their trading strategies.