Hft Quotes

The Algo Wars were leaving a path of destruction in their wake. “HFT algos reduce the value of resting orders and increase the value of how fast orders can be placed and cancelled,” wrote Nanex researcher Eric Hunsader. “This results in the illusion of liquidity. We can’t understand why this is allowed to continue, because at the core, it is pure manipulation.

The orders resting on BATS were typically just the 100-share minimum required for an order to be at the front of any price queue, as their only purpose was to tease information out of investors. The HFT firms posted these tiny orders on BATS—orders to buy or sell 100 shares of basically every stock traded in the U.S. market—not because they actually wanted to buy and sell the stocks but because they wanted to find out what investors wanted to buy and sell before they did it. BATS, unsurprisingly, had been created by high-frequency traders.

You will read over and over again in this book how important it is to do your homework. To prepare. To practice. To be disciplined. To be smart. To make smart trading moves. You will not win every round against algorithms and HFT, but you can win some of the rounds, and you can profit. You must be able to identify the different algorithmic programs so that you can trade against them. This takes some experience, good mentoring, and practice.

The big Wall Street banks wanted to trade in their own dark pools not only because they made more money—on top of their commissions—by selling the right to HFT to exploit orders inside their dark pools.

The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall Street banks. When things went well, the HFT guys took most of the gains; when things went badly, the HFT guys vanished and the banks took the losses.

A now-classic example of the failure of this sort of HFT took place in September 2008 when the investment bank Lehman Brothers (ticker: LEH, now delisted after bankruptcy), Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp (ticker: FRE), and many other mortgage holdings and investment banks all suffered a massive drop in price. Programs tried to buy their already broken stock to squeeze and burn the short sellers, but the stock price never went higher. Day traders and huge institutional sellers dumped their shares on the program. The programs and their developers were obliterated and left holding huge quantities of worthless shares of LEH and FRE, as well as other bankrupted holdings.

The argument in favor of high-frequency traders had beaten the argument against them to the U.S. regulators. It ran as follows: Natural investors in stocks, the people who supply capital to companies, can’t find each other. The buyers and sellers of any given stock don’t show up in the market at the same time, so they needed an intermediary to bridge the gap, to buy from the seller and to sell to the buyer. The fully computerized market moved too fast for a human to intercede in it, and so the high-frequency traders had stepped in to do the job. Their importance could be inferred from their activity: In 2005 a quarter of all trades in the public stock markets were made by HFT firms; by 2008 that number had risen to 65 percent. Their new market dominance—so the argument went—was a sign of progress, not just necessary but good for investors.

The new structure of the U.S. stock market had removed the big Wall Street banks from their historic, lucrative role as intermediary. At the same time it created, for any big bank, some unpleasant risks: that the customer would somehow figure out what was happening to his stock market orders. And that the technology might somehow go wrong. If the markets collapsed, or if another flash crash occurred, the high-frequency traders would not take 85 percent of the blame, or bear 85 percent of the costs of the inevitable lawsuits. The banks would bear the lion’s share of the blame and the costs. The relationship of the big Wall Street banks to the high-frequency traders, when you thought about it, was a bit like the relationship of the entire society to the big Wall Street banks. When things went well, the HFT guys took most of the gains; when things went badly, the HFT guys vanished and the banks took the losses.

bright idea came from a new employee, James Cape, who had just joined them from an HFT firm: Coil the fiber. Instead of running straight fiber between the two places, coil thirty-eight miles of fiber and stick it in a compartment the size of a shoebox to simulate the effects of the distance. And that’s what they did. The information flowing between IEX and all the players on it would thus go round and round, in thousands of tiny circles, inside the magic shoebox. From the high-frequency traders’ point of view, it was as if they’d been banished to West Babylon, New York.