Browsing: Algorithmic and high-frequency trading

A year ago, in a report on Big Data and investment management, Citi Business Advisory Services predicted that “with the improved volume, velocity and variety of data inherent in the big data approach, the innovation seen in systematic trading models over the past decade could accelerate.” One of the platformsRead More

More than a year ago, the Capco Institute Journal of Financial Transformation (Journal) ran a “critical assessment,” by Robert Sams, of bitcoin blockchains as a means of distributed clearing. With both bitcoins and blockchains newly in the news, Sams’ informed assessment is worth another look. Two years ago, Nasdaq announcedRead More

Mid-October news reports tell us that Navinder Sarao has lost his effort to avoid extradition from Britain to the United States. So he will face charges in the U.S. in connection with the “flash crash” of May 2010, the incident in which the DJIA fell 998.5 points in less thanRead More

The long-awaited nickel-tick pilot program, an effort to test an alternative to the penny-or-less tick sizes that now prevail, , officially gets underway on October 3, and is scheduled to continue for two years. Securities have been selected and the phase-in schedule is set. The pilot is of significance, becauseRead More

There has been a flurry in recent days of activity about blockchains among the graybeards of the financial world, those who ponder the Really Big Picture and who have the ear of important regulators. Let us start from the beginning. What is a blockchain? It is a chronological, virtual, andRead More

Two scholars associated with the University of California, Berkeley, have argued in a recent paper that there is less to latency arbitrage, or at least to a certain paradigmatic sort of latency arb, than meets the eye. Robert P. Bartlett III and Justin McCrary used data from the Securities InformationRead More

On Friday, June 17, the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the promotion of IEX from an ATS to a proper exchange. Thereby it gave a new ending of sorts to Michael Lewis’ book, Flash Boys. One of the big issues for both proponents and opponents of IEX’ application to becomeRead More

IEX, the institution created by Michael Lewis’ “flash boys,” began life as an ATS. But as its name, a shortening of “Investors’ Exchange,” suggests, it has always aspired to be an exchange. One of its core principles is its “speed bump,” a system of delaying the availability of market pricingRead More

Guest columnist Ginger Szala looks at pro rata and what happens if...Read More

The judge's ruling setting aside the jury's guilty verdict is, of course, grand news for Aleynikov. It is also the curtain on a sometimes farcical spectacle. But let us not forget that there are issues of principle involved. Read More

Spoofing is probably about as ubiquitous as texting-while-driving. And it is possible to make an example of a spoofer caught red-handed. But it isn't clear what purpose that will serve. The real problem is that a broken market contains a broken set of incentives. Read More

It is of course possible to “question the wisdom of the SEC’s stance on this issue and its fairness to ordinary investors,” said the Judge in the Lanier/HFT decision. But the court isn’t in the business of second guessing the wisdom of regulation. Lanier's claims are dismissed. Read More

Authorities now claim that the shenanigans that set off the flash crash of May 2010 were the work of Navinder Singh Sarao. Does this mean Waddell & Reed were unjustly maligned? Almost certainly. Read More

A party seeking to employ an expert witness is supposed to let the other side know who the expert is in advance of trial. Fans of a classic Joe Pesci movie will remember that it isn't necessary to join the prosecutor in a hunting lodge. Read More

The U.S. Department of Justice typically brings high-profile antitrust actions against 'monopolists' by piling its legal theories on top of dubious micro-economics. A recent announcement by Microsoft sends Faille down memory lane, to two 1990s era actions by the D of J against MS in the days when Bill Gates was still a great media ogre. Read More

This is the story of one high-frequency trading firm suing one or more others and giving detailed credence to everything that has been said over the last year or so by those who bemoan the rise of HFT firms. Read More

To the extent that high-frequency trading is analogized to 'insider trading,' it may be in trouble with securities regulators but still in the clear with commodities regulators. After all, the latter do allow hedgers to use non-public material information to protect themselves. But Gregory Scopino doesn't believe pinging and related HFT practices should be in the clear with the CFTC at all. Read More

A physicist recently suggested that exchanges might do well to change the nature of the trading they host, holding batch auctions every one-hundredth of a second to better serve their real economic functions. Then a commenter proposed that taxation could achieve the same effect. Our physicist went back to the drawing board to consider this. Read More

An SNB announcement caused wild market moves Jan. 15th, not only in Forex but in commodity and equity prices as well. In the wake of the commotion, one key question has to be: why the announcement? Why this sudden change in the policy of Switzerland's central bankers? Read More

Guest columnist Diane Harrison looks at both sides of the quantitative investment debate.Read More

A new paper by a senior market economist at BNP Paribas celebrates the invention of Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ), a machine-learning algorithm that could enable some smart economists to get very rich indeed. Read More

Sprecher proposes that the exchanges and the investment banks enter into a deal, and that regulators confirm it by various tweaks in the NMS. The whole dynamic that the "grand bargain" represents is a disturing one, old-fashioned smoke-filled-room cronyism. Read More

The Permal Group takes a refreshingly modest view of the eventual impact of Big Data on the business model of hedge fund managers. The better the data about a corporation, the more accurate the stress testing. Yes, that seems reasonable. Read More

Observers of the slow slog toward an empirical test of larger tick sizes have raised concerns about the details of the three-track plan under consideration. In particular, there's an order-protection feature for one of the three "tracks" that has raised the hackles of Larry Tabb and the STARead More

One of the unintended consequences of high-frequency trading may be that it forces a market re-design. Guest columnist Ginger Szala looks at the issues.Read More

What is the real issue behind intermarket sweep orders, and the recent dust-up over an NYSE rules change? Faille answers: Privilege. Read More

The most intriguing revelation in the exchange of briefs between the State of New York and Barclays appears in a humble footnote, where Barclays seems to concede that an employee was pressured to change an internalization number. But it was just the once.... Read More

Guest columnist and intrepid reporter Doug Friedenberg talks to Brad Katsuyama about HFT, Michael Lewis and more.Read More

What do I mean by "front run," asked a reader. I use the term for a range of situations in which one party trades on the basis of advance [non-public] information of another party's upcoming trade, Faille replies. Read More

Christopher Faille reviews the basic facts about SIP, the Securities Information Processor, and cites (with some incredulity) a new contention in some quarters that SIP isn't all that important because nobody really relies upon it. Read More

It does appear that speed is helpful in generating alpha. How is it helpful? Here there are two views, and the less HFT-friendly of these views has received some scholarly/empirical support. Read More

Who or what is responsible if an ATS' self-learning behavior drifts into terrain that, performed by a human, would constitute manipulative behavior? Does it matter than another algorithm has lately passed the Turing test? Read More

HFTs and trading venues alike have worked hard to fit their practices into the Reg NMS framework. As a consequence, violations of NMS “are unlikely” Dolgopolov writes, “to provide a basis for civil liability of HFTs who use such orders because of their compliance – however formalistic – with this regulatory norm.”Read More

ESMA defines HFT as “a special class of algorithmic trading in which computers make decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe and of taking a decision in relation thereto.” It then decides that needs further definition.Read More

After some preliminaries, McGonagle got around to the central subject of his testimony, the Concept Release on Automated Trading that the CFTC had issued back in September 2013. Much of his testimony was designed to give Congress an inkling of the range of reactions the CR has since elicited. Read More

MiFIR includes provisions that allow for "dark pools" and that limit the size -- or, if you will, the depth -- of such pools. On June 10, 2013, authorities in Brussels released a new proposal for tweaks of MiFIR in general and these provisions in particular.Read More

With a wide range of troubling issues on my mind, I recently consulted a sage of the trading-algorithm world, Greg Woods, the head of algorithmic execution, listed derivatives and foreign exchange for Deutsche Bank Securities. He has more than twenty years of experience in the broad IT area.Read More

Guest columnist Louis Lovas looks at data management in the world of algorithmic trading.Read More

Dark trading in Australia is becoming more multilateral and 'market-like' over time, a task force has found. That doesn't sound especially alarming, but ASIC believes the situation may encourage breaches of the Market Integrity Rules and the Corporations Act.Read More

The Germans seem prepared to experiment with limits on high-frequency trading, as we see in a recent Bundestag vote that leaves the particulars to BaFin. I spoke recently to David Weild, a former vice chairman of NASDAQ, about this experiment and about related issues.Read More

Bank of England white paper on high-frequency trading yields little in the way of return.Read More

The report seeks to alleviate certain concerns about both high-frequency and algorithmic trading. In particular, "The evidence available to this Project provides no direct evidence that computer-based HFT has increased volatility in financial markets." Still, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, and the Project does acknowledge prudential concerns. Read More

The real problem behind the 2010 flash crash, Hull says, is that again as in 1987 (in a different way of course) traders were working within a market structure that allowed “the illusion of liquidity” to displace the real thing. He cites an authority, because as he says his firm, Ketchum, likes to stay close to the academic literature.Read More

The new technologies make less difference than some might think. "Even back in the days of physical market makers, when things went bad, as for example in the crash of '87, the market makers would head for the hills," said James Angel. Nowadays the computers go dark. Or (worse) they don't.Read More

There has been a perhaps-unexpected consequence of the disappearance of the old-fashioned floor traders. Floor trading used to serve as a training regimen, "from which many of the industry's leading discretionary traders originated." Without the floors, the talent pool has dried up.Read More

What happened after decimalization? Spreads did fall, but these authors say that “displayed liquidity at the National Best Bid and Offer” also fell, at least in part because there were 100 price points for each dollar now, where once there had been eight or 16, so limit orders no longer come in clusters. This in turn made “pinging and sniffing for order flow” a lot easier, heralding the rise of the sort of algorithmic trading that is to the ordinary retail investor what a hawk is to a mouse. Read More

Here is a draft definition of high frequency trading presented to the CFTC on June 20. HFT is a form of automated trading that employs: (a) algorithms for decision making, order initiation, generation, routing, or execution, for each individual transaction without human direction; (b) low-latency technology that is designed to minimize response times, including proximity and co-location services; (c) high-speed connections to markets for order entry; and (d) high message rates (orders, quotes, or cancellations).Read More

Quite aside from the neat through-the-planet short-cuts they might allow: how fast is a neutrino? This turns out to be a very controversial matter. Last year, scientists working at CERN set off weeks of feverish speculation with reports indicating that neutrinos travel faster than light. If I understand this at all, it would mean if true that a New York or London trader could in theory accept a Tokyo trader’s offer before the offer had actually been made. Now that would be the ultimate in HFT: negative latency. Read More

Chief Judge Dennis Jacons said that the statutory language refers on the one hand to products that have “already been introduced into [placed in] the stream of commerce” and on the other hand to those that “are still being developed or readied” [produced for] such placement. The words evoke two distinct sets of products with a sequential relationship to one another, which satisfies well-established rules of statutory construction. The district court had upheld the indictment against challenge along these lines, because the district court had construed the language to include the production of anything whose purpose is “to facilitate or engage in such commerce.” The appeals court panel found error here.Read More

Cinnober has sold a customized form of its Scila Surveillance software -- a product designed to detect abnormal market behavior -- to the Qatar Exchange. One of the purposes of Scila Surveillance is the detection of harmful variants of algorithmic trading, such as the trading "snipers" who drive off market makers and reduce liquidity. Read More