High-Frequency Trading (HFT) and Market Quality Research: An Evaluation of the Alternative HFT Proxies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the soundness of high-frequency trading (HFT) proxies that are widely defined on the limit order book (LOB) information. We use a unique TRTH (Thomson Reuters Tick History) millisecond time-stamped intraday trades and quotes dataset enriched with 10 levels of LOB depth messages for 149 highly fragmented LSE listed stocks for the period 2005 to 2016. We explore a sharp uptrend in HFT activities and accompanying improvement in market liquidity in the European market. We show that alternative HFT proxies built on LOB are not equally powerful. The HFT proxy defined on the five best LOB prices (the mid point of a typical limit order book) provides a better HFT identification than the one popularly defined on the first best prices (BBO). We suggest that picking the LOB information beyond a certain level (e.g., the best five prices) of market depth in developing HFT proxy is counterintuitive. Evidence indicates that high-frequency traders (HFTs) participate in both competitive (narrow) and passive (wider) quoting as a market making strategy; however, they do not participate in passive quoting excessively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".