Every description of an HFT algo seems to fall into one of three categories:
* Acting on public information, milliseconds before anybody else - which helps everybody else about as much as insider trading does.
* Acting on trading information gleaned from "bid stuffing" (making and canceling orders really quickly) - which helps everybody else about as much as front running does.
* Detecting the presence of large trades about to go through or going through and capitalizing on the price movements they cause - i.e. imposing a tax others making large trades in the stock market.
In return, they flood the market with liquidity when it is least needed and withdraw it suddenly when it is (e.g. when prices are diving).
Acting on public information, milliseconds before anybody else - which helps everybody else about as much as insider trading does.
"They can do it faster, therefore it must be illegal."
Acting on trading information gleaned from "bid stuffing" (making and canceling orders really quickly) - which helps everybody else about as much as front running does.
The only people that notice this behavior are...other people capable of doing this behavior. Why should it matter to you, the long-term investor, the trading tactics computers employ at the millisecond scale?
Detecting the presence of large trades about to go through or going through and capitalizing on the price movements they cause - i.e. imposing a tax others making large trades in the stock market
This happens in any market at any timescale. Everyone capitalizes on trends.
You are replying to the wrong points.The question is not are these things illegal, or does everyone do them.
question is, do they benefit the market as a whole? Traders do not have a right to perform HFT, and if it destabilise markets, we can take steps to reduce it (of course, there is then the issue of how to take steps without causing different problems)
How else would you connect the exchanges? Or you don't want major exchanges to be connected, and say, if you dump a lot of stock at one exchange you don't want that information to propagate to other exchanges?
Benefits of having HFT traders, is that at the cost of having them around you can have fair and level ground. So if you come to one exchange to do a transaction, you don't have to think much about exchange intrinsics, like liquidity available there, fee structure, etc. Because these differences are being arbitraged away by HFT traders.
And again, what is the alternative? Exchanges that are connected by human traders making phone calls?
The real question is: Why are there multiple exchanges for the same papers to begin with?
In the case of stocks, for example, there has to be one ultimately authoritative copy of who owns which stocks anyway. So why not just do all the trading in the place where the authoritative copy is stored?
That would certainly seem to be more efficient from the perspective of minimizing the overall social cost.
Why are there multiple exchanges for the same papers to begin with?
Because it allows the exchanges to compete on features (latency, order types) and pricing (transaction fees, connectivity costs).
In the case of stocks, for example, there has to be one ultimately authoritative copy of who owns which stocks anyway. So why not just do all the trading in the place where the authoritative copy is stored?
For equities, trading and settlement are two separate steps. Trading occurs on the exchanges and, for U.S. equities, settlement is handled by the DTCC, the central counterparty for all U.S. equities trading. Handling all the specifics and details of what happens after a trade is executed is a massive industry.
For some products, trading does occur only on one exchange. Typically in futures trading, an exchange will develop a product (a contract) and that contract can only be traded on that exchange which also handles settlement.
> So why not just do all the trading in the place where the authoritative copy is stored? That would certainly seem to be more efficient from the perspective of minimizing the overall social cost.
And what if trading on that exchange will stop for a couple of days for technical reasons? What kind of problems can that create to stock of large company, that can be traded only on that exchange? Or what, if the whole exchange will go out of business? Or decide to charge arbitrary large trading fees?
Competition and diversity is generally a good thing. Tend to increase efficiency and minimize overall costs. That's valid for exchanges as well.
The reason there are multiple exchanges is the same reason you can buy the same pair of shoes at 10 different places: it is competition.
Also, what is the social cost you are referring to? There are a lot of people here saying that HFT doesn't provide "social value". Does it somehow provide less social value than traders screaming at each other in the pits? Similar types of trading always existed, except now it's done by computers. For what it's worth, HFT provides well-paying jobs for a lot developers and ops people and often is very supportive of the engineering community.
If you try to design a system of publicly traded companies from first principles, then the purpose of exchanges should be to provide a service to publicly traded companies. That service would be maintaining the authoritative record of who owns how many shares of the company.
Given this notion, competition is a good reason for the existence of multiple exchanges, because it means companies can change which exchanges their shares are traded over. However, it is not a good justification for the fact that trading of the same stock happens on multiple exchanges.
As for the social cost, you do realize that HFT does not come for free to society. At a minimum, society must somehow pay for those well-paying jobs to developers. And what do those developers give back to society? Before you answer, please consider whether you should distinguish between algorithmic trading and HFT. I do believe that algorithmic trading is useful to society (because it can do the job that screaming traders used to do better and cheaper), but the subset of HFT is not useful.
The only things anyone ever seems to be able to answer for HFT two-fold: one, that stock prices change faster, and two, that the spread is smaller. But one point one, nobody in the real economy cares about that, and to point two, the decrease in spread also doesn't matter to anybody in the real economy, because what you really care about there is the fluctuation of the share price over a larger timescale such as one full day. I have not seen any evidence that this fluctuation is affected by HFT in any way.
If you try to design a system of publicly traded companies from first principles, then the purpose of exchanges should be to provide a service to publicly traded companies. That service would be maintaining the authoritative record of who owns how many shares of the company.
I don't think there's any reason to think that exchanges' main purpose for existence is to provide service to publicly traded companies. Exchanges are just a store, and their purpose is to buy/sell stuff and make a profit. So, in that sense, having multiple exchanges selling the same stock is the same as having multiple bike stores selling the same bike...it's competition and there aren't many downsides to it.
As for the social cost, you do realize that HFT does not come for free to society. At a minimum, society must somehow pay for those well-paying jobs to developers. And what do those developers give back to society? Before you answer, please consider whether you should distinguish between algorithmic trading and HFT. I do believe that algorithmic trading is useful to society (because it can do the job that screaming traders used to do better and cheaper), but the subset of HFT is not useful.
Nothing comes for free to society. Funding a never-ending number of failing start-ups doesn't come free to society either. What is that giving back to society? Your implication is that HFT trading is somehow taking something from society that it doesn't deserve. What is it taking? Also, in terms of making distinctions: HFT is the superset and AT is the subset, not the other way around. All AT shops are HFT shops, but there are actually quite a few HFT shops that don't run algorithms and instead run based on inputs controlled by traders.
The only things anyone ever seems to be able to answer for HFT two-fold: one, that stock prices change faster, and two, that the spread is smaller.
This is the crux of the whole thing. Why does anyone have to answer for HFT? This is implying that HFT is hurting people however you haven't not given any proof of this (besides that it doesn't add value). If anything, I think HFT's biggest crime (as someone else has mentioned) is that sucks some really smart people into working on problems of a rather limited scope.
This is actually how most of the European equities markets start and end the trading day. During the auction period, anyone can submit an order at a given size at price. When the auction ends, the exchange matches at the price that maximizes the number of shares traded. The rest of the trading day operates in what is referred to as a "continuous auction" where orders are matched continuously based on price/time priority.
To be clear, the way (most) exchanges solve this problem now is by what's called "queue" priority. The longer an order has been resting at a level the higher it's priority is.
This means that those who can respond faster can get into a price level sooner. Breaking this out to minute bounds doesn't mitigate their advantage in any way shape or form.
It is hard to know what the results of a change like this would be. I suspect it would make the markets much less stable as there would be less information to make accurate prices, causing huge variances on minute long ticks.
Show me a market where such a restrictive view is mandated and I will show you a failed market. This notion that "trading should benefit the market" is complete and total nonsense propagated by people with no understanding of liquidity. Trading is adversarial by definition.
1987 was caused by portfolio insurance from major funds, not HFT (which didn't really exist then as it does now). HFT also didn't cause the mortgage crisis. That was long term consumer financing & Gov mortgage buyers & pension investors. HFT was definitely involved in the flash crash, but what were the long term implications of that? Zero. The most recent blip was caused my dissemination of bad news via a source that had been compromised. Again, not HFT.
Want to hate HFT (I do!)? Hate it because it isn't profitable (which is why I left in 2010) and because it still sucks up engineering talent like a black hole of despair.
These anti-HFT articles that occasionally come out are hilarious because the money that put HFT on the public radar simply isn't there anymore. Look at GETCO.
The question I have is why is the public so willing to accept disinformation? Residual banker hate?
> Detecting the presence of large trades about to go through or going through and capitalizing on the price movements they cause
Large trades move the market, full stop. That's a feature, not a bug. Moving a lot of size changes the market's estimate of the value of whatever you're moving. Splitting up large orders into smaller pieces is attempting to hide that information, why should that be a privileged operation?
You forget that for every buyer there is also a seller.
If HFTs push the markets higher slightly faster because of new public info then while it might be bad for you if you are buying on that news, it's great for whoever already owns the stock and is the one selling to you.
The same applies to your 3rd point. It might be a tax on whoever initiated the large trade, but it's a benefit to whoever is on the other side of the trade. HFTs put new information into the market much faster than humans ever could making them more efficient. They're also doing it at a lower cost than human market makers ever did.
Would you rather have a person or a machine serve as the market maker?
If anything, HFTs have made it cheaper to trade. Because of the way exchanges are setup, the man in the middle will always be making a cut of the trades. Now though that cut is measured in pennies rather than what used to be often 1/2 dollar spreads.
Sure some of the predatory algorithmic trading serves no benefit to anyone, but you will always have people gaming/attacking the system if there's arbitrage potential.
* Acting on public information, milliseconds before anybody else - which helps everybody else about as much as insider trading does.
* Acting on trading information gleaned from "bid stuffing" (making and canceling orders really quickly) - which helps everybody else about as much as front running does.
* Detecting the presence of large trades about to go through or going through and capitalizing on the price movements they cause - i.e. imposing a tax others making large trades in the stock market.
In return, they flood the market with liquidity when it is least needed and withdraw it suddenly when it is (e.g. when prices are diving).
There's literally nothing to like about HFT.