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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper proposes and analyses (both theoretically
and empirically) a class of market making mechanisms that seek to provide
liquidity to a market while making a profit through the control of a
bid-ask spread. Crucially, this is done without assuming that the prices
are due to some stochastic process. The key trick is to make use of
existing results for learning with expert advice algorithms where, in the
market setting, each expert corresponds to a fixed bid-ask spread
strategy. By assuming that market prices are exogenous and of bounded
volatility the authors show how guarantees for algorithms such as follow
the perturbed leader and multiplicative weights can be adapted to provide
guarantees on the regret on the value of the market maker's position
relative to the fixed spread experts. Experimental work show the resulting
algorithm working in practice on history stock price data.
Despite
there being a glaring typo in the title of the paper, the presentation is
overall of a high standard. All the key terms are clearly motivated and
defined and the proofs are clear and correct. The relevant literature is
adequately surveyed and demonstrates that the existing results are novel
and significant.
## Other Suggestions
1. Although
discretisation is a reasonable way to simplify the analysis, it was not
immediately clear how this affects the bounds. Some discussion about how
the choice of $\delta$ and $M$ will change the bound in Theorem 2 for a
fixed choice $B$ would be enlightening.
2. I would have liked to
have seen some discussion of alternative strategies to discretisation. For
example, why are results over continuous spaces of experts (e.g., online
convex optimisation) applicable here?
3. On line 258 it would be
worth explicitly saying that the vectors $H_t$ etc. are in $\mathbb{R}^N$.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This is a well written paper that clearly demonstrates
the potential of applying online "learning with experts" algorithms to
designing market mechanisms. The framework introduced here should form the
basis for other future work.
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_9
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper presents a nice algorithm for trading a
commodity (e.g. stock of certain type) for a market maker (i.e. an entity
that must buy from/sell to everybody). The paper nicely explains a
(somewhat simplified) mechanics of the stock exchange (limit orders and
market orders).
The paper presents a natural set of base
strategies. The set of base strategies is parametrized by a parameter "b"
-- the spread between buy and sell price. On top of these strategies they
authors apply standard online algorithms (Randomized Weighted Majority
Algorithm, Follow the Perturbed Leader) for hedging/switching between the
base strategies. What makes the application non-trivial is that any
strategy (base or not) is stateful -- namely it maintains "cash" and
"inventory" (i.e. a number of underlying stocks). Since standard
algorithms "for learning with expert advice" are stateless, this makes
their application somewhat non-trivial. To overcome this authors prove
that certain interesting structural properties of set of base strategies
(e.g. the buy-sell price interval of a base strategy with smaller spread
is contained in the interval of a strategy with bigger spread). This
allows the authors to derive a bound on the regret (i.e. convergence)
relative to the best base strategy in hindsight.
The paper is very
clearly written. I like it very much and I am happy to recommend it for
acceptance.
I have to admit that I don't have time to go through
the proofs in detail, but all lemmas seem plausible. Also, I am not
familiar with the mathematical finance literature, so I am not sure how
interesting this result is within finance context. However, within context
of online learning this is a novel, and very interesting result.
1) Please fix the typo ("Marking" -> "Market") in the title of
the paper -- it's embarrassing :)
2) Please be consistent in
typesetting authors' names in the references. There are missing dots (e.g.
"Robert E Schapire"). Sometimes the first name of a person is present,
sometimes there's just the initial ("S. Das" vs "Sanmay Das").
Couple of random ideas for future research:
- It seems
that regret of your algorithm depends on the number of switches between
the underlying base strategies. There are few recent COLT papers with
variants of Randomized Weighted Majority Algorithm (i.e. Hedge/Exponential
Weights Algorithm) and Follow the Perturbed Leader that achieve small
number of switches between experts. (see e.g. "Regret Minimization for
Online Buffering Problems Using the Weighted Majority Algorithm", COLT
2010 and "Prediction by random-walk perturbation", COLT 2013).
-
Would it be possibly to get rid of the delta-discretization? The
discretization seems to be just an ugly artifact of the model/algorithm.
Or to put it differently, what happens in the limit delta --> 0?
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This is a very nice and novel paper about online
algorithms for a market maker on a stock exchange (or a commodity market).
It contains elegant mathematical model, algorithm and nice theoretical
results about the algorithm. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_10
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper considers a market making problem as
described below. The trader maintains two variables, H_t in R
(inventory) and C_t in R (cash), which are initially set to 0. For
each trial t = 1,...,T, the following happens: 1. Observe a market
price p_t in the discrete set PI = {d, 2d, ..., M}. 2. (Market order)
The trader chooses X in R, and then H_{t+1} = H_t + X and C_{t+1} =
C_t - p_t X. 3. (Execute Limit Order, skip if t = 1) The trader
executes the limit order, specified by a function L_t: PI to R+, which
is placed in the previous trial. If p_t > p_{t-1}, then H_{t+1}
-= \sum_{p in PI, p_{t-1} < p <= p_t} L_t(p) and C_{t+1} +=
\sum_{p in PI, p_{t-1} < p <= p_t} p L_t(p); and if p_t <
p_{t-1}, then H_{t+1} += \sum_{p in PI, p_t <= p < p_{t-1}}
L_t(p) and C_{t+1} -= \sum_{p in PI, p_t <= p < p_{t-1}} p
L_t(p). 4. (Place Limit Order) The trader choose a function
L_{t+1}: PI to R+ such that L_{t+1}(p_t) = 0. 5. (Portfolio) The
portfolio of the trader becomes V_{t+1} = C_{t+1} + p_t H_{t+1}.
The goal of the trader is make the final portfolio V_{T+1} as
large as possible.
The paper proposes a simple class of
strategies for the limit order, called the spread-based strategies.
Each strategy is specified by a single parameter b in {d, 2d, 3d, ...,
Nd}. Then, the paper proposes an algorithm that combines the
spread-based strategies using a method of low-regret online prediction
algorithm (such as Hedge and FPL) to make its own strategy for the
limit order. The algorithm also employs an appropriate strategy for
the market order and then achieves an O(sqrt(T log N)) regret bound.
The reduction from the market making problem to online prediction
is non-trivial and this work may open a new application area of
online prediction methods.
The cons are that the regret is
measured only with respect to the limit order with a fixed strategy
for the market order. I wonder whether we can also consider a natural
strategy class for the market order and derive an algorithm that is
competitive with the best offline strategies for the market order as
well as for the limit order. Moreover, the paper does not provide
a new method from the viewpoint of machine learning.
The title
of the paper may have a typo.
Q2: Please summarize
your review in 1-2 sentences
This work is a nice application of online prediction.
Perhaps it could be better when presented at a more appropriate
conference like EC.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for their careful reading of
the paper and their constructive suggestions - especially for catching the
typo in the title, which is indeed embarrassing and will be fixed
promptly!
Assigned_Reviewer_10: Market order based strategies:
We did not consider competing with strategies that only set market orders.
This is perhaps not a bad suggestion, but it didn't match with the main
goals of the work, which was to compete with other market making
strategies. By definition, a market maker makes both buy and sell offers
simultaneously, and we considered strategies within this realm.
Assigned_Reviewer_8: Discretization: The discretization
parameter delta makes sense only in conjunction with the liquidity density
parameter alpha. For every unit price change, the strategies trade
alpha/delta shares. To compare different discretization parameters delta,
it makes sense to also adjust alpha so that alpha/delta is a fixed value
so that the number of shares traded per unit price change is the same. The
regret bound of Theorem 2 for general alpha and delta is scaled by the
same factor, viz. alpha/delta, and so it remains unchanged with changing
discretization. We agree this should have further discussion in the final
version which we intend to add.
Continuous spaces of experts: This
is a good idea, one we considered. Unfortunately, the payoff functions are
not convex (or rather, concave) so online convex optimization cannot be
applied here.
Assigned_Reviewer_9: COLT papers on minimizing
switches between experts: yes we have considered utilizing such switching
strategies. But the results mentioned have the same expected number of
switches, viz. O(sqrt{T log(N)}). Thus they don't provide an improvement
over what we have in the present paper.
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