High frequency trading has been characterized as an arms race with 'Red Queen' characteristics [Farmer,2012]. It is improbable, even impossible, that many market participants can sustain a competitive advantage through the sole reliance on low latency trade execution systems. The growth in volume of market data, advances in computer hardware and commensurate prominence of machine learning in other disciplines, have spurred the exploration of machine learning for price discovery. Even though the application of machine learning to price prediction has been extensively researched, the merit of this approach for high frequency market making has received little attention. This paper introduces a trade execution model to evaluate the economic impact of classifiers through backtesting. Extending the concept of  confusion matrix, we present a 'trade information matrix' to attribute the expected profit and loss of tick level predictive classifiers under execution constraints, such as fill probabilities and position dependent trade rules, to correct and incorrect predictions. We apply the execution model and trade information matrix to Level II E-mini S&P 500 futures history and demonstrate an estimation approach for measuring the sensitivity of the P&L to classification error. We describe the training of a recurrent neural network (RNN) and show (i) there is little gain from re-training the model on a frequent basis; (ii) that there are distinct intra-day classifier performance trends; and (iii) classifier accuracy quickly erodes with the length of prediction horizon. Our findings suggest that our computationally tractable approach can be used to directly evaluate the performance sensitivity of a market making strategy to classifier error and can augment traditional market simulation based testing.
High frequency trading has been characterized as an arms race with 'Red Queen' characteristics [Farmer,2012]. It is improbable, even impossible, that many market participants can sustain a competitive advantage through the sole reliance on low latency trade execution systems. The growth in volume of market data, advances in computer hardware and commensurate prominence of machine learning in other disciplines, have spurred the exploration of machine learning for price discovery. Even though the application of machine learning to price prediction has been extensively researched, the merit of this approach for high frequency market making has received little attention. This paper introduces a trade execution model to evaluate the economic impact of classifiers through backtesting. Extending the concept of a confusion matrix, we present a 'trade information matrix' to attribute the expected profit and loss of tick level predictive classifiers under execution constraints, such as fill probabilities and position dependent trade rules, to correct and incorrect predictions. We apply the execution model and trade information matrix to Level II E-mini S&P 500 futures history and demonstrate an estimation approach for measuring the sensitivity of the P&L to classification error. Our approach directly evaluates the performance sensitivity of a market making strategy to classifier error and augments traditional market simulation based testing.
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We describe the training of a recurrent neural network (RNN) and show (i) there is little gain from re-training the model on a frequent basis; (ii) that there are distinct intra-day classifier performance trends; and (iii) classifier accuracy quickly erodes with the length of prediction horizon. Our findings suggest that our computationally tractable approach can be used to directly evaluate
Our approach directly evaluates
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can augment
augments