In Conversation with Citadel's Ken Griffin

"The American consumer does not seem to be as happy as he used to be"

Yeah, because of assholes like him, who used their financial capital to lobby for regulatory changes that enriched them but destroyed the system. Today's US equity market is a farce, a completely disconnected, fragmented market place without equal access for the purposes of maximum intransparency. This is just one single example.

The big picture is that a system has been created that favors the few uber wealthy and ensures they and their descendents stay in power at the expense of everyone else.

Then asking why people feel disenfrenchised is displaying an unprecedented audacity and disrespect for the rest.

 

How? Is a single exchange with specialists better?

 

A single exchange without specialists is better. One single market place where supply meets demand. No artificial creation of supply or demand, no hidden orders. Such market place worked for thousands of years for all sorts of commodities. Fragmentation only arrived with hedge funds who pushed into trading over the past 2 decades and created their own dark polls and alternative exchanges. Nor should there be specialists who artificially impact pricing.

 

I have no problem with multiple exchanges.
What I do have a problem with is posted bids/offers being able to pull in a microsecond before your order routes to them.

It’s an illusion of liquidity

 

You have no problem about multiple exchanges yet complain about an issue about multiple exchanges. Imagine you place a buy order on one exchange. It gets posted but before it makes it to any other exchange and the nbbo someone else who sees your order on the exchange it was originally posted pulls his offer that is currently best offer on another exchange. How is that possible? By transporting that information through faster routes than the exchanges can themselves. The offer gets pulled and the offer you thought you can lift is magically gone. Well, there is no magic in it at all. Someone was just faster than the exchanges can communicate.

 

There is no illusion of liquidity. Google colocation and stocks. There is a pecking order. You learn to deal with it. Otherwise you cannot participate successfully in trading.

 

isn't that how a futures exchange works? CME? then people complain about hfts

 

Yes and that's what it should be, a single exchange. You introduce a completely unrelated issue, hft. Has nothing to do with fragmented markets. I am all in to completely ban hft for various reasons but that's another topic.

 

Has nothing to do with queue priority. You miss the topic, as usual.