Order Flow to Price Impact

A research-only system that asks when order flow predicts a future move—and refuses to turn a failed data-quality gate into a market, execution, or profit claim.

Market microstructureOrder flowEvidence gates

Research question

When do order-flow imbalance, liquidity, and limit-order-book conditions predict short-horizon price movement—and which claims survive data-quality and execution gates?

Predictability, executability, and profitability are separate questions. The project makes event ordering, temporal leakage, gaps, fees, latency, uncertain fills, adverse selection, and inventory risk explicit before a claim can be promoted.

The published gate result

StageRows inspectedWarningsOutcome
BTCUSDT training2,071,4610Normalization passed.
ETHUSDT training987,29753The predeclared zero-warning gate failed.
Model selection0Not started.
Held-out evaluation0Dates were not opened.

The valid terminal is INSUFFICIENT_DATA. It is evidence that the protocol stopped correctly—not evidence for or against a market hypothesis. Execution and P&L remain NOT_RUN.

Methodology

  1. Preserve exchange and receipt ordering with explicit continuity epochs.
  2. Construct features only from information observable at decision time; labels begin strictly afterward.
  3. Use purged, embargoed, time-ordered model selection and held-out evaluation.
  4. Keep predictive diagnostics separate from fees, latency, fills, adverse selection, and inventory assumptions.
  5. Freeze checksummed run bundles and generate reports from those artifacts instead of copying preferred metrics into prose.

Public data boundary

The public GitHub and Dataset packages contain source code, configuration, tests, protocols, and documentation. They do not redistribute exchange observations, normalized or derived events, fitted states, ingestion authorities, or generated run bundles. The portfolio's “data paths” count covers adapter modules and empty directory markers—not market observations. Users obtain public market data independently under provider terms.

Reproduce and inspect

Run make setup, make check, and make reproduce-sample for the deterministic synthetic vertical slice. Synthetic output verifies software behavior only.

Limitations

  • Public trades do not reveal true queue priority, hidden liquidity, or cancellations.
  • Exchange timestamps are not colocated receipt times.
  • The frozen trade study stopped before selection and held-out evaluation.
  • No result is a live-trading, significance, capacity, profitability, or investment claim.