On Bonart's interpretation of the Square-Root Impact Law

Abstract

The square-root impact law (SRIL), $I=Y\sigma \sqrt{Q/V}$, bundles two facts that a single mechanism must explain at once: a shape (impact proportional to square-root of traded volume $Q$) and an amplitude ($Y=O(1)$, independent of the participation rate $\phi$). Bonart has recently proposed an elegant solution: if realized and counterfactual prices are both diffusive, information-neutral impact must have white increments and the SRIL follows without the wart. We reformulate and simplify his argument, and foreground the ingredient he himself regards as essential --- that the market whitens the stationary stream of each participant's metaorders, not any isolated one. The Lillo--Mike--Farmer model satisfies his premises, yet gives an isolated metaorder the super-square-root impact ${\phi }^{(1-\gamma )/2}{Q}^{(1+\gamma )/2}$, $\gamma \in (0,1)$, because single metaorders (i.e. not part of a stream) are statistically invisible and thus priced mechanically. We then construct an explicit multi-agent propagator that realizes Bonart's whitening, and show it reproduces the clean SRIL precisely when the market can attribute trades to their issuer. But correct re-attribution of anonymous trades is a formidable task, which requires markets to behave as implausibly efficient signal processing machines. The stream hypothesis makes a sharp, falsifiable prediction --- isolated metaorders, well separated in time, should not obey the SRIL --- that does not seem agree with empirical data known to us. Independently, a volume-conservation argument singles out the square-root law and lays bare the step the diffusivity route must assume: diffusivity fixes the variance of impact --- an additive, stationary, age-blind quantity --- whereas the SRIL is a law for the mean impact, which marginally decays as $1/\sqrt{\text{age}}$ and therefore demands an origin of time.

19 pages, 1 figure, 30 references