I guess they were betting to get this HFT thing going unsuspected with normal market conditions, but for they bad luck, after regNMS the market gone trough 2 crisis . There are no big slow fishes out there anymore, no liquidity, and the small ones soon enough found out what was all that about. Just imagine how much more money would they made if the markets countinued to operate under pre-2007 conditions and traders didn´t care about them cause there would be a plenty of liquidity left out there.
They even beat you in Rock, Paper, Scissors. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/...ts-you-at-rock-paper-scissors-100-of-the-time I've had enough of these hfts...
yes ,yes and yes. this is why 'they' will do just fine, without 'fresh meat'. and that exactly what they doing for past decade. squeezing everyone else OUT of the market.cause they can. cause they want to suck every single penny possible out of your pension plan,where you hold your mutual funds or whatever. cause they both don't care-GS on one side of the trade and pension plan manager on other. they both paid! guaranteed! as long as you work and invest your retirement money. and they spit it in your face,when report their earnings from trading depts..remember? no single down day-GS,BAC,MS? how is this possible? it's possible because they have every single thing THEIR way. rules,regulations,markets,technological advantage.every single things possible. i agree, that markets are never been 'fair',but what we have today is a blatant ABUSE, a spit in the public's and regulators face. US stock market today is a great illustration of US as a country. both been bought and raped by WS. and like George Carlin said-and nobody seems to notice and nobody seems to care..RIP Carlin...RIP good old USA
stop sub penny now or allow it for everyone. allow us to see sub penny orders. we can't even see them cause our platforms are displaying everything rounded to a 2 decimal points. how fucked up that is? it's a plain BS..
this one is a bit extreme(but not surprising at all)..there is a variation of that 'theme',which i'm experiencing every single day tens of times a day. you buy at ask(forget buying at the bid these days)-you submit your buy order->someone steps on front of you,buying those shares and most of the time you will get 1-5 shares. now-the asking price is higher and you have partially executed order. in this situation 'they' fucked you at least 2 times.-you pay higher spread and double your commission(which will be higher,cause you removing liquidity and modifying your initial order).
Ask them to try to manipulate eur/usd , the U S indices are miniature in comparison , even playing field on fx , that is why more traders trade fx.
from what i've seen over the years-i pretty certain, that majority of fx traders trade currencies because of high leverage,not because they having problems with HFT on stocks. most of them are trying to became a millionaire trading $500 accounts. poor,under capitalized aggressive, compulsive crowd..
The cross pairs in the FX are full of HFT's that do 3 way arbs on any price discrepancies from the general pairs... so... it's not like there's no HFT"s in FX...