Switching Frictions, Heterogeneous Trading Horizons, and Long-Memory Order Flow

Abstract

This paper develops a mechanism through which costly changes in the representations used for portfolio choice can contribute to persistent signed order flow. Heterogeneous switching thresholds and opportunity volatility generate heterogeneous residence times, and renewal aggregation maps their execution-weighted tail into the decay of aggregate flow covariance. Under common execution weights, the same tail determines the exponent of representation-spell durations, the order-flow memory exponent, and the horizon at which finite-market scaling must end. First-passage renewal analysis establishes these joint restrictions. Structural simulations recover them from realized paths, quantify the distortion created by mismatched weights, and show how finite cross sections shorten the usable inference horizon. The resulting empirical protocol converts an aggregate persistence fit into cross-dataset restrictions that can determine whether a duration-based kernel is suitable for a separate execution-cost model.