Happy High Frequency Trading Day!

Michael Peltz has a mammoth 13-pager on High Frequency Trading in the latest issue of Institutional Investor magazine.  The article is chock full of important information, including the 25 stocks most played with by high frequency traders (Sprint, Las Vegas Sands, Bank of America…). 

It also contains some killer quotes.  Here are a couple before I send you over to read the whole thing:

An exchange between the writer and financially-savvy Senator Ted Kaufman:

“We have a 300-pound gorilla in the room, and we’re saying that we’re going to keep it in a cage somewhere,” he told me. “This thing will be 600 pounds.”

“But isn’t part of the problem that there are 300 gorillas?” I asked, referring to the fact that an estimated 200 to 400 firms do high frequency trading.

“Good point,” he replied. “We have all these gorillas, and guess what? We put them in zoos where the people running the zoos don’t have enough information and authority to take care of them.”

Seth Merrin of LiquidNet, a block trading marketplace:

“The institutions are the equivalent of the British army, walking down the battlefield wearing bright red.  The high frequency traders are the Americans hiding in the woods in camouflage, picking them off. If the British army hadn’t changed its tactics, they would have lost every subsequent war.”

There are some HFT defenders in the piece, spouting the usual rhetoric about how wonderful their liquidity is (a claim that I believe was invalidated during the Flash Crash as the robots drooped their heads like marionettes with cut strings just when their liquidity was needed most), but these defenders are industry insiders for the most part.

Anyway, get acquainted with the players involved and the terminology – this debate is just beginning.

Source:

Inside The Machine (II)

Tags: $S $BAC $LVS