Simultaneous Trading in 'Lit' and Dark Pools

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive model for optimal trading across lit and dark pools, incorporating price dynamics, market impacts, and partial executions, and derives strategies using viscosity solutions of associated PDEs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel continuous-time framework combining order-driven exchange dynamics with dark pool trading, including impact effects and partial executions, to determine optimal trading strategies.

Findings

Optimal strategies depend on risk aversion levels.

Roundtrip dark pool posting is not always optimal.

Explicit examples illustrate the model's application.

Abstract

We consider an optimal trading problem over a finite period of time during which an investor has access to both a standard exchange and a dark pool. We take the exchange to be an order-driven market and propose a continuous-time setup for the best bid price and the market spread, both modelled by L\'evy processes. Effects on the best bid price arising from the arrival of limit buy orders at more favourable prices, the incoming market sell orders potentially walking the book, and deriving from the cancellations of limit sell orders at the best ask price are incorporated in the proposed price dynamics. A permanent impact that occurs when 'lit' pool trades cannot be avoided is built in, and an instantaneous impact that models the slippage, to which all 'lit' exchange trades are subject, is also considered. We assume that the trading price in the dark pool is the mid-price and that no fees are due for posting orders. We allow for partial trade executions in the dark pool, and we find the optimal trading strategy in both venues. Since the mid-price is taken from the exchange, the dynamics of the limit order book also affects the optimal allocation of shares in the dark pool. We propose a general objective function and we show that, subject to suitable technical conditions, the value function can be characterised by the unique continuous viscosity solution to the associated partial integro differential equation. We present two explicit examples of the price and the spread models, and derive the associated optimal trading strategy numerically. We discuss the various degrees of the agent's risk aversion and further show that roundtrips, i.e. posting the remaining inventory in the dark pool at every point in time, are not necessarily beneficial.