High-frequency market-making with inventory constraints and directional bets

We extend the market-making models with inventory constraints of Avellaneda and Stoikov ("High-frequency trading in a limit-order book", Quantitative Finance Vol.8 No.3 2008) and Gueant, Lehalle and Fernandez-Tapia ("Dealing with inventory risk", Preprint 2011) to the case of a rather general class of mid-price processes, under either exponential or linear PnL utility functions, and we add an inventory-risk-aversion parameter that penalises the marker-maker if she finishes her day with a non-zero inventory. This general, non-martingale framework allows a market-maker to make directional bets on market trends whilst keeping under control her inventory risk. With this inventory-risk-aversion parameter, the market-maker has not only direct control on her inventory risk but she also has indirect control on the moments of her PnL distribution. Therefore, this parameter can be seen as a fine-tuning of the marker-maker's risk-reward profile. In the case of a mean-reverting mid-price, we show numerically that the inventory-risk-aversion parameter gives the market-maker enough room to tailor her risk-reward profile, depending on her risk budgets in inventory and PnL distribution (especially variance, skewness, kurtosis and VaR). For example, when compared to the martingale benchmark, a market can choose to either increase her average PNL by more than 15\% and carry a huge risk, on inventory and PNL, or either give up 5\% of her benchmark PNL to increase her control on inventory and PNL, as well as increasing her Sharpe ratio by a factor bigger than 2.

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Source https://hal.science/hal-00675925
Author Fodra, Pietro, Labadie, Mauricio
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 15, 2026, 15:59 (UTC)
Created May 15, 2026, 15:59 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00675925
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Laboratoire de Probabilités et Modèles Aléatoires (LPMA) ; Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6 (UPMC)-Université Paris Diderot - Paris 7 (UPD7)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
creator Fodra, Pietro
date 2012-03-02T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 67a6a818-449f-4809-a537-39bab1b68097
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2025-09-29T00:00:00
set_spec type:UNDEFINED