IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/apmtfi/v27y2020i1-2p67-98.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Spoofing and Price Manipulation in Order-Driven Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Álvaro Cartea
  • Sebastian Jaimungal
  • Yixuan Wang

Abstract

We model the trading strategy of an investor who spoofs the limit order book (LOB) to increase the revenue obtained from selling a position in a security. The strategy employs, in addition to sell limit orders (LOs) and sell market orders (MOs), a large number of spoof buy LOs to manipulate the volume imbalance of the LOB. Spoofing is illegal, so the strategy trades off the gains that originate from spoofing against the expected financial losses due to a fine imposed by the financial authorities. As the fine increases, the investor relies less on spoofing, and if the fine is large, the investor does not spoof the LOB. The arrival rate of buy MOs increases because other traders interpret the spoofed buy-heavy LOB as an upward pressure on prices. When the fine is low, spoofing considerably increases the revenues from liquidating a position. Spoofing increases the PnL because (i) the investor employs fewer MOs to draw the inventory to zero and benefits from roundtrip trades, which stem from spoof buy LOs that are ‘inadvertently’ filled and subsequently unwound with sell LOs; and (ii) the midprice trends upward when the book is buy-heavy; therefore the spoofer sells the asset at better prices.

Suggested Citation

  • Álvaro Cartea & Sebastian Jaimungal & Yixuan Wang, 2020. "Spoofing and Price Manipulation in Order-Driven Markets," Applied Mathematical Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 27(1-2), pages 67-98, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:apmtfi:v:27:y:2020:i:1-2:p:67-98
    DOI: 10.1080/1350486X.2020.1726783
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/1350486X.2020.1726783
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/1350486X.2020.1726783?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Long, Yunshen & Yan, Jingzhou & Wu, Liang & Long, Xingchen, 2024. "Market price determination: Interpreting quote order imbalance under zero-profit equilibrium," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 134(C).
    2. Kasim Khorasanee, 2024. "Spoof, Bluff, Go For It: A Defence of Spoofing," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 189(1), pages 201-215, January.
    3. Haochen Li & Maria Polukarova & Carmine Ventre, 2023. "Detecting Financial Market Manipulation with Statistical Physics Tools," Papers 2308.08683, arXiv.org.
    4. Alvaro Arroyo & Alvaro Cartea & Fernando Moreno-Pino & Stefan Zohren, 2023. "Deep Attentive Survival Analysis in Limit Order Books: Estimating Fill Probabilities with Convolutional-Transformers," Papers 2306.05479, arXiv.org.
    5. Mohammad Javad Rajaei & Qusay H. Mahmoud, 2023. "A Survey on Pump and Dump Detection in the Cryptocurrency Market Using Machine Learning," Future Internet, MDPI, vol. 15(8), pages 1-17, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:apmtfi:v:27:y:2020:i:1-2:p:67-98. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RAMF20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.