Crowded Trades, Market Clustering, and Price Instability

Abstract

Crowded trades by similarly trading peers influence the dynamics of asset prices, possibly creating systemic risk. We propose a market clustering measure using granular trading data. For each stock the clustering measure captures the degree of trading overlap among any two investors in that stock. We investigate the effect of crowded trades on stock price stability and show that market clustering has a causal effect on the properties of the tails of the stock return distribution, particularly the positive tail, even after controlling for commonly considered risk drivers. Reduced investor pool diversity could thus negatively affect stock price stability. source of price instability, but also a channel of volatility spillovers, eventually resulting in correlated price jumps. In that case, market clustering would foster systemic risks. Market clustering might be an example of an existing market structure that can amplify seemingly unimportant events into wide-spread market volatility. In case market clusters coincide with otherwise interconnected institutions, for example banks, common asset devaluation can be a crucial default contagion channel, as suggested in recent interdisciplinary research (Tsatskis, 2012;Glasserman and Young, 2016;Levy-Carciente et al., 2015).Market clustering is expected to cause price shocks, because it amplifies the effect of existing sources of price fluctuations. More specifically, market clustering is expected to increase the chance of price shocks in two different situations: Firstly, when the order deluge due to the group behaviour overwhelms the supply (Stein, 2009;Braun-Munzinger et al., 2018) and, secondly, when the supply is thin due to the homogeneity of the investors' pool, i.e. a lack of liquidity at one side of the order book (Weber and Rosenow, 2006). In both situations market clustering increases the chance that the demand exceeds the supply, either in buy or sell orders.We start our investigation of the influence of trading patterns by studying the relation between market clustering and the price dynamics of individual stocks. Our market clustering measure is unique in the sense that it quantifies two aspects of group behavior: clustering and crowdedness. We define price instability as an increase of the number of sharp price fluctuations, such that the tails of the log return distribution are heavier. Specifically, we investigate whether there is a causal relation between market clustering and the skewness, kurtosis, tail indices, positive and negative outlier counts, changes in downside risk and upside gains.The analysis of trading patterns depends on the ability to distinguish to what extent the patterns are the result of higher order features like group behaviour instead of lower order properties. In this research, we represent stock trading by a complex bipartite network (a two-layer network with non-trivial topological features). The two layers are the investors and the stocks. The links between the layers are the trades during a particular time period.We use the maxi...