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Liquidity-Based Audit of Algorithmic Trading Strategies

Irene Aldridge

arXiv 27 Jun 2026 · Econometrics

arXiv:2606.29018 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

We show that net demand for liquidity by algo strategies is identifiable from its trade and price history alone, with no knowledge of its signal or optimization problem. An exact multi-period regret decomposition implies that the sign of this statistic classifies a linear strategy as a net liquidity consumer or provider, recovering the Kyle (1985) informed-trader/market-maker dichotomy from observables alone. Under an AR(1) cost process, the same statistic equals the product of strategy size and the squared Roll (1984) implied spread, making the correction a direct proxy for prevailing illiquidity. Extending to endogenous price impact and aggregating across N correlated strategies yields a liquidity-balance condition whose violation produces welfare loss scaling as N squared, a closed-form fire-sale externality. We calibrate to CRSP equity data (2016-2025), tracking implied spreads through the COVID-19 and 2022 rate-shock episodes, with an estimator computable in O(Tnd) time.

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22
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Roll, Richard (1984) A Simple Implicit Measure of the Effective Bid-Ask Spread in an Efficient Market1.00084100%
2Kyle, Albert S (1985) Continuous Auctions and Insider Trading1.00074100%
3Almgren, Robert and Chriss, Neil (2001) Optimal Execution of Portfolio Transactions0.73732100%
4Ledoit, Olivier and Wolf, Michael (2004) A Well-Conditioned Estimator for Large-Dimensional Covariance Matrices0.73732100%
5Hasbrouck, Joel (1991) Measuring the Information Content of Stock Trades0.64422100%
6Jegadeesh, Narasimhan and Luo, Jiang and Subrahmanyam, Avanidhar and… (2025) Short-Term Reversals and Longer-Term Momentum around the World0.64422100%
7Mamais, Panagiotis (2025) Explaining and Predicting Momentum Performance Shifts Across Time and Sectors0.64422100%
8Nagel, Stefan (2012) Evaporating Liquidity0.64422100%
9Glosten, Lawrence R. and Milgrom, Paul R (1985) Bid, Ask and Transaction Prices in a Specialist Market with Heterogeneously Informed Traders0.51121100%
10Bai, Zhidong and Silverstein, Jack W (2010) Spectral Analysis of Large Dimensional Random Matrices0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 22 scored citations.