Poachers turned gamekeepers

Interesting to read the venerable Leo Melamed’s open letter in the FT this week on HFT and regulators. The CME’s chairman emeritus certainly makes a good point when he says that trying to stifle innovation is both wrong and inevitably doomed to failure, but I am not sure he’s completely right in a couple of areas. First, whilst it’s true that algorithmic or HFT players have... Read More

All I want for Xmas is exchange consolidation/competition (delete as appropriate)

Despite all the announcements, press briefings and other hullabaloo it looks like the BATS/Chi-X deal is the only one that’s actually going to get done this year. SGX/ASX and LSE/TMX are just two of the higher profile casualties in the global game of exchange Monopoly. Add to this the conversations and negotiations that never reached the public domain and you have a dazzling array... Read More

‘Rebunking’ the HFT myth!

Following yesterday’s request for further papers on HFT, my thanks to Jelle Elzinga, Director and Board Member of Optiver Holding, for sending through his firm’s view and allowing me to share it with the fragmentation community. Not surprisingly, Optiver believes that “HFT is nothing more or less than an evolution of a system that has been in operation for decades.” What... Read More

Debunking the HFT myth

I came across an interesting paper the other day published by GETCO: A Modern Market Maker’s Perspective on the European Financial Markets Regulatory Agenda. The HFT community has come in for quite a bit of stick recently and so it was refreshing to see an intelligent and well argued explanation of its role in today’s financial markets. One of the key points GETCO makes... Read More