The two square root laws of market impact and the role of sophisticated market participants

The goal of this paper is to disentangle the roles of volume and of participation rate in the price response of the market to a sequence of transactions. To do so, we are inspired the methodology introduced in arXiv:1402.1288, arXiv:1805.07134 where price dynamics are derived from order flow dynamics using no arbitrage assumptions. We extend this approach by taking into account a sophisticated market participant having superior abilities to analyse market dynamics. Our results lead to the recovery of two square root laws: (i) For a given participation rate, during the execution of a metaorder, the market impact evolves in a square root manner with respect to the cumulated traded volume. (ii) For a given executed volume $Q$, the market impact is proportional to $\sqrt{\gamma }$, where $\gamma$ denotes the participation rate, for $\gamma$ large enough. Smaller participation rates induce a more linear dependence of the market impact in the participation rate.