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High frequency trading

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high frequency trading

While high-frequency trading has propped up volume in the market, the method rewards shortsighted investors looking to make a quick profit Follow TIMEBusiness As long as there has been a Wall Street, there have been those seeking to skim a little or a lot off the top of the vast trading changing hands in the markets each day. Though capital markets in America are by and large very successful at efficiently allocating resources from investors to deserving businesses, wherever there is great wealth, corrupt forces will seek to exploit it. For example, in the s the Nasdaq stock exchange was embroiled in a price-fixing scandal in which securities dealers were found to be colluding to keep bid-ask spreads — or the difference between the prices at which a stock is bought and sold — high in order to bolster profits. Partially in response to scandals of that nature, the stock market — with the blessing of federal regulators — has radically evolved. High majority of trading takes place frequency a series of for-profit, electronic venues that compete fiercely to facilitate trades and increase profits. This fragmentation was accompanied and encouraged by the rise of high-frequency trading, a term that describes the use of high-powered computer programs to trading hundreds or thousands of trades per trading in an attempt to exploit miniscule inefficiencies in the markets. One way high-frequency traders like to make money is by watching large institutional investors — the sort that manage money for your k or public pension funds — and attempting to predict how they will go about high investments. For instance, a computer program might try to interpret moves in the market to see whether a large fund is in the process of buying up a large position in a stock, and then jumping in ahead of those trades before selling for a profit moments later. But there are those who also believe that such practices as high above are actually just a sophisticated way for traders to use high-powered computer programs to extract wealth from the stock market without adding value to it in any way. Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk, co-founders of the brokerage firm Themis Trading, have been vocal critics of high-frequency trading for several years. They write: Sadly, today, the primary purpose of the stock market is not capital formation. Investors are an afterthought. The primary purpose of the stock exchanges has devolved to catering to trading class of highly profitable market participants called high-frequency traders or HFTs, who frequency interested only in hypershort-term trading, investors be damned. These supercomputers are the source of so much business for stock exchanges that they will sell or give away a lot of data about who is trading what stocks and when. MORE Best and Worst Sports-Team Relocations in History Advocates of high-speed trading argue that these computers are doing the valuable service of increasing the total number of trades occurring in the market at any given time, or what those on Wall Street call volume. The idea is that the more volume and liquidity there is in the market, the more accurately prices will reflect the value of a given security, and frequency cheaper it is for investors to transact. This is broadly true. Volume over the past 20 years has increased in the marketplace, and it is cheaper than ever to conduct trades. But as we saw in the flash crash, liquidity can vanish quickly when high-frequency trading frequency sniff a bit of trouble. And while bid-ask spreads have narrowed, high-frequency trading is wildly profitable. They are making their money by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the market — and as Arnuk and Saluzzi would argue — through unfair advantages given to them by exchanges. Those profits are coming directly out of the pockets of long-term investors. If transaction costs have been reduced by additional volume from high-frequency traders, and these same systems are making investing more costly for investors in other ways, how does that enhance high markets? high frequency trading

5 thoughts on “High frequency trading”

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