Albert “Pete” Kyle

Albert “Pete” Kyle’s research focuses on market microstructure, including topics such as high frequency trading, informed speculative trading, market manipulation, price volatility, the informational content of market prices, market liquidity, and contagion. He changed the thinking in academia about the way markets operate with his seminal 1985 paper, nicknamed Kyle ’85.

Kyle was the 2018 recipient of the prestigious CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications for landmark contributions to the theory of economics and market structure. Previously, scholars taught that pure market forces, not the influence of any individuals, controlled prices. But Kyle grew up around the cotton trade in Tennessee with his father and grandfather, both cotton merchants. Kyle saw firsthand the influence traders have on prices. Kyle also had a major influence on the advent of digital trading, working with federal regulators to modernize Nasdaq transactions and level the playing field with electronic access for large institutional traders and the masses to make prices more competitive.

The CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications recognizes an individual or a group for originality and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of global economics.