Bond Market Making with a Hit-Ratio Target
Abstract
We study OTC bond market making on a size ladder with quadratic inventory penalty and a running target on the dealer's size-weighted hit ratio within a stochastic optimal control approach. We demonstrate that the corresponding reduced Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation remains separable by dualizing the hit ratio target term and provides the exact optimal controls through the inverse of the fill-probability function and the Hamiltonian derivative. We then focus on the quadratic approximation \'a la Bergault et al., which yields a Riccati equation for the inventory curvature while retaining the exact quote map. In its linearized form, this approximation produces explicit quote decompositions into riskless spread, inventory-risk correction, and hit-ratio correction. The formulation is general and applies to multi-bond, multi-client-tier scenarios, with special cases obtained by restricting the targeted tiers, their bond coverage, and their associated targets.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.20406,
title = {Bond Market Making with a Hit-Ratio Target},
author = {Alexander Barzykin and Axel Ciceri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.20406},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages, 9 figures