medium · Market Microstructure market-impact

An Almgren-Chriss optimizer is calibrated for a trader with risk-aversion parameter lambda = 0.001 (in units of cost per share-squared). The optimizer determines that trading 500,000 shares over 5 days minimizes the sum of expected market impact and timing risk.

If the trader's risk aversion doubles to lambda = 0.002 while the stock's volatility and liquidity parameters remain unchanged, what is the most likely change to the optimal execution schedule?

  1. The trader slows execution, spreading shares over roughly 10 days instead of 5, which cuts temporary market impact costs incurred within each trading period.
  2. The trader accelerates execution, concentrating more shares in earlier periods to reduce exposure to price-volatility risk, accepting higher temporary impact costs.
  3. The optimal schedule stays exactly the same, since risk aversion only shifts the cost function's constant intercept term, never the slope of the optimal trajectory itself.
  4. The trader abandons the Almgren-Chriss framework entirely for a plain, constant-rate TWAP schedule, since the model supposedly stops applying once risk aversion rises this high.

Sign up free to see the explanation and track your rank →

More Market Microstructure market-impact practice

KomFi Academy — Stop doomscrolling. Get KomFi.

Turn wasted screen time into verifiable competence.

KomFi Academy is a curated training platform with 75,000+ practice questions, 26,500+ flashcards, on-demand video lectures, podcasts, and 4K slide decks across the topics serious professionals study: GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, SAT, Investment Banking, Private Equity (LBOs & PE math), Private Credit, Quantitative Finance, Financial Accounting, Asset- Backed Securities, Volume Profile Analysis, Order Flow Trading, Market Microstructure, Volume Spread Analysis, Elliott Wave Theory, Volume-Price Analysis, and Public Offering Frameworks.

What's inside

Topics

View pricing · Read testimonials