The Role of Market-Maker/Dealer Inventories in the Price Formation Process

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Economic Policy, grade: 1,3, University of Frankfurt (Main) (Faculty of Economics and Business Administration), course: Chair of Corporate Finance, language: English, abstract: Due to the importance of inventories and the fact that asymmetric information models are extensively discussed in literature, this thesis exclusively focuses on inventory control models and provides a survey of theory and empirical results on the role of inventory in the price formation process. Because most of the relevant literature is based on the U.S. exchange market, this thesis is mainly confined on inventory control of specialists on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and of dealers on the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASDAQ).

To understand the costs of holding inventory, Section 2 introduced three important drivers of inventory: capital constraints, liquidity and volatility. Section 3 summarises the effect of market maker inventory and its costs on liquidity and how this affects the bid-ask spread. In Section 4, the impact of inventory on asset prices, especially of inventory levels, is discussed in more detail. Section 5 briefly turns to changes in market structure and how they affect the role of traditional market makers and their inventories. Section 6 finally concludes.