Learning unfair trading: A market manipulation analysis from the reinforcement learning perspective

Abstract

Market manipulation is a strategy used by traders to alter the price of financial assets. One type of manipulation is based on the process of buying or selling assets by using several trading strategies, among them spoofing is a popular strategy and is considered illegal by market regulators. Some promising tools have been developed to detect price manipulation, but cases can still be found in the markets. In this paper we model spoofing and pinging trading from a macroscopic perspective of profit maximisation, two strategies that differ in the legal background but share the same elemental concept of market manipulation. We use a reinforcement learning framework within the full and partial observability of Markov decision processes and analyse the underlying behaviour of the perpetrators by finding the causes of what encourages these traders to perform fraudulent activities. Procedures can be applied to counter the problem as our model predicts the activity of the manipulators.