Dynamic slippage control and rejection feedback in spot FX market making

TL;DR

This paper develops a dynamic FX market-making model that incorporates latency-driven adverse selection, explicit slippage control, and reputation-based client modulation, providing practical approximation methods for optimal quoting and rejection strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint optimization of quotes and rejection rules considering latency risk and client reputation, with a tractable approximation for real-time policy implementation.

Findings

Rejection feedback effectively modulates client order flow.

The quadratic approximation yields explicit formulas for optimal quotes.

The model captures the impact of latency and reputation on market-making strategies.

Abstract

We study an OTC FX market-making problem, built on the Avellaneda-Stoikov tradition, in which a dealer streams size-dependent quotes on a discrete ladder and manages inventory risk over a finite horizon under Poisson arrivals of trade requests. Adverse selection is modelled through latency-driven price moves over a delay window, represented by Gaussian marks whose conditional means can depend on the quoted spread, capturing selective client reaction to stale quotes. The dealer can address latency risk through trade rejection when slippage breaches a tolerance threshold. We treat slippage tolerance as an explicit control jointly optimized with quotes: upon receiving a trade request, the dealer chooses an acceptance/rejection rule, which makes the trade economically akin to an embedded option written on the latency price move. We further introduce rejection feedback through an EMA-based rejection score used as a reputation proxy, so that client intensity is endogenously modulated by past rejections via a multiplicative factor. Using dynamic programming, we derive a Markov control problem with state variables (inventory, rejection-score) and show how rejection decision enters the HJB equation through Hamiltonians that include an expectation over the latency mark and a maximization over both quote and rejection rule parameters. For practical control evaluation, we develop an adiabatic-quadratic approximation: fixing reputation on the inventory-control time scale, expanding Hamiltonians to the second order, and adopting quadratic ansatz in inventory, yielding tractable Riccati-type ODE and closed-form expressions for approximate quotes and slippage thresholds. This approximation provides a fast surrogate for policy design and enables self-consistent calibration of rejection behaviour.