Theory for long memory in supply and demand

Recent empirical studies have demonstrated long-memory in the signs of orders to buy or sell in financial markets [2, 19]. We show how this can be caused by delays in market clearing. Under the common practice of order splitting, large orders are broken up into pieces and executed incrementally. If the size of such large orders is power law distributed, this gives rise to power law decaying autocorrelations in the signs of executed orders. More specifically, we show that if the cumulative distribution of large orders of volume v is proportional to v to the power -alpha and the size of executed orders is constant, the autocorrelation of order signs as a function of the lag tau is asymptotically proportional to tau to the power -(alpha - 1). This is a long-memory process when alpha