Browsing: Algorithmic and high-frequency trading

By Nicolas Rabener of FactorResearch (@FactorResearch) INTRODUCTION When pitching an investment product with a backtested history the frequent response from potential investors is that they have never seen a bad backtest. Naturally this is true as there is no point in marketing a strategy with a poor backtest as investorsRead More

A lot of hopes have been placed on changes in market tick sizes. In the 1990s there was a big push to reduce the tick sizes of securities, allowing them to get down to one cent or fractions thereof. In the new millennium came a sense of regret. Observers suspectedRead More

There are reports that Google is preparing an announcement of “quantum supremacy” for later this year. If true, this is the biggest tech story since the transistor replaced vacuum tubes. It could be a disruptive development for just about every business with an IT department. Among much else, quantum supremacyRead More

On Feb. 1, ICE Futures US Inc., informed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that it was instituting a new “speed bump,” formally called the Passive Order Protection (or POP) Functionality for its gold daily and silver daily futures markets. The idea of POP is to limit the advantage that canRead More

Three scholars associated with the University of Wollogong, Australia, recently published a paper on the contribution of high-frequency traders to the absorption of new information by the markets, especially in relation to the prices of interest rate derivatives. The study is the work of Alex Frino, Michael Garcia, and IvyRead More

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently imposed a stay on part of its transaction fee pilot (TFP). There is understandably a good deal of debate about the significance of this stay. The TFP, initiated in December 2018 with the expectation that it would run for at least one year, andRead More

Many high-frequency trading (HFT) firms have disappeared into larger firms as merger activity has increased recently. Those acquired include Chopper, Infinium, Teza, RGM Advisors, and Sun Trading. It also includes Getco, the Chicago-based firm founded in 1999 by two former floor traders that almost defined the field for some time.Read More

Two scholars working with Bayesian probability theory recently published a fascinating discussion of market timing and portfolio efficiency. They have proposed what they call a “hierarchical ensemble learning portfolio.” Yes, that sounds rather heavy on the jargon. We’ll break it down a bit in what follows. The authors of theRead More

Algorithmic trading may fairly be said to have conquered the public equities world, although there are still pockets of resistance and related controversies. The robots have now turned their attention to the bond markets. Bond markets are different from stock markets in a lot of ways, and many of theseRead More

The NYSE, on Thursday, Feb. 14, Nasdaq, and Cboe Global Markets (the following day) have united to bring lawsuits against the Securities and Exchange Commission to stop its transaction fee pilot. These are the three largest US equity exchanges and their attitude toward their regulator is usually one of cooperation.Read More

Glassbridge has put out an ambitious white paper about the “evolution of asset allocation across the investment management industry,” one that begins with the basics of the Capital Asset Pricing Model and ends with quantitative analysis and crowdsourcing. The premise is that new strategies, and new ranges of data, areRead More

The Principal Traders Group of the Futures Industry Association (FIA PTG) recently offered its thoughts on market structure, outlining one direction of reform for the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Reg NMS. Reg NMS (National Market System) was promulgated in 2005, in order to ensure competition among markets, and in theRead More

A new study prepared for the Federal Reserve Board looks at the use of algorithms to read and interpret financial news. While there have been a lot of studies that have looked at this topic, one unique feature of this new paper, “First to ‘Read’ the News,” is that itRead More

By standard definition, a “quantitative” investing strategy is one that selects securities using customized models, often algorithm-driven and thus on the operational level independent of human judgment. Again working from standard definitions, a “fundamental” investing strategy involves an examination of whether the entity issuing a security (corporation, sovereign, or other)Read More

The term “big data” has become a cliché. One has to remind one’s self that it is a somewhat ill-fitting label. What is new about the world of data isn’t that there is a lot of it; nor that on the software end the processing of data becomes easier overRead More

Two scholars affiliated with the Indian Institute of Management, in Calcutta, have posted a paper about the effects of algorithmic trading on liquidity. This paper, by Samarpan Nawn and Ashok Banerjee, based on the first chapter of Nawn’s Ph.D. dissertation, distinguishes sharply between proprietary algorithmic traders and agency algorithmic traders,Read More

The Alternative Investment Management Association and Societe Generale Prime Services have together put out a white paper about managed futures funds and the commodity trading advisers who manage them. A key themes of the paper is that managed futures strategies aren’t as risky as are typical investments in equity markets.Read More

Six years ago Michael Coscia placed orders through the CME Group’s Globex platform via a trading algorithm that amounted to “spoofing.” He placed both large and small orders in the copper market, for example, with the large orders (cancelled within milliseconds) designed to create the illusion of market movement inRead More

A little over a year ago, the Bank for International Settlements announced its 11th Triennial Central Bank Survey of Foreign Exchange and Over the Counter Derivatives Market Activity. In recent days, Pragma Securities has referenced those BIS numbers in explaining the market for its latest service, an expansion of PragmaRead More

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