Modeling the coupled return-spread high frequency dynamics of large tick assets

Abstract: Large tick assets, i.e. assets where one tick movement is a significant fraction of the price and bid-ask spread is almost always equal to one tick, display a dynamics in which price changes and spread are strongly coupled. We introduce a Markov-switching modeling approach for price change, where the latent Markov process is the transition between spreads. We then use a finite Markov mixture of logit regressions on past squared returns to describe the dependence of the probability of price changes. The model can thus be seen as a Double Chain Markov Model. We show that the model describes the shape of return distribution at different time aggregations, volatility clustering, and the anomalous decrease of kurtosis of returns. We calibrate our models on Nasdaq stocks and we show that this model reproduces remarkably well the statistical properties of real data.