finally everyone is waking up to the fact that hft does not create liquidity it destroys it. there is no real depth to any order book. they are a mirage. orders are pulled in milli seconds. what a joke this market is. i reckon 80 percent of exchange volume is hft round trip rebated bullshit.
Only DirectEdge has flash, right? NSDQ and BATS got rid of them as of Sept 2009 -- at least that was the latest news I saw. So if that's still true, then why are you sending flashable orders (generally only available with very specific routing anyway) via DirectEdge when you don't want them flashed? Speaking of a "mirage" -- many people seem to be blaming today's tight markets on HFT, when in reality things have just become too competitive for them to be profitable in short-term trading. My guess is that the market will never be "loose" enough again for many previously profitable traders to make a profit. There are a number of things I'd like to see changed (and yes, banning flash is one such thing; banning internalization + sub-pennying + payment-for-order flow is another, and much more significant). But what public info there is indicates that even the HFT's are finding it very difficult to compete in this environment, and their profitability seems to have cratered to a fraction (like 1/100) of their 2008 levels-- at least in the publicly visible ones (Optiver, Timber Hill AKA Interactive Brokers, and GS's equity group). If there is an HFT that's still doing extremely well then please post it -- I'm really curious about this myself.
Human nature has not changed since we started walking upright thus how we behave/react to fear and greed remains unchanged. All u can go through: http://www.neurosoftware.ro/finance/tag/tradebot/
I am not sure HFT's are the cause of our problems, even HFT's have been pulling back. America is simply not open for business at this point in time.
these HFT are the new market makers and are just doing what market maker have been doing for years. trading against clients and frontrunning as for liquidity..it's the market makers evil axis.
HFT has fucked this market up greatly. This will be the next long debate in years to come as more people realize the unfair playing field.
No way would they have existed, look at the credit crisis were in, they didn't even mind when housing prices were soaring 20%-30% a year, they let everything get out of control until it collapsed. Now here we have bubble Ben bernanke trying to print his way out of this crisis.
So to put it another way you are saying that the true liquidity providers are those suckers that are too slow to get out of the way when they need to/want to?
notice that according to the resident shill and poser, tj, anyone not trading sub millisecond off a co located scambox is a loser. you folks figure out who the enemy is yet?