Correlation of coming limit price with order book in stock markets

We examine the correlation of the limit price with the order book, when a limit order comes. We analyzed the Rebuild Order Book of Stock Exchange Electronic Trading Service, which is the centralized order book market of London Stock Exchange. As a result, the limit price is broadly distributed around the best price according to a power-law, and it is not randomly drawn from the distribution, but has a strong correlation with the size of cumulative unexecuted limit orders on the price. It was also found that the limit price, on the coarse-grained price scale, tends to gather around the price which has a large size of cumulative unexecuted limit orders. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.