Order Flows and Limit Order Book Resiliency on the Meso-Scale

Abstract

We investigate the behavior of limit order books (LOBs) on the meso-scale motivated by order execution scheduling algorithms. To do so, we carry out empirical analysis of the order flows from market and limit order submissions, aggregated from tick-by-tick data via volume-based bucketing, as well as various LOB depth and shape metrics. We document a nonlinear relationship between trade imbalance and price change, which however can be converted into a linear link by considering a weighted average of market and limit order flows. We also document a hockey-stick dependence between trade imbalance and one-sided limit order flows, highlighting numerous asymmetric effects between the active and passive sides of the LOB. To address the phenomenological features of price formation, we construct regression models to identify the most significant predictors, confirming the predictive power of limit order flows. Another finding is that the deeper LOB shape, rather than just the book imbalance, is more relevant on this timescale. The empirical results are based on analysis of six large-tick assets from Nasdaq.