Monday, February 4, 2013

High Speed Trading and $Millions per minute (Mother Jones)

EXCERPTS:
"Within minutes, a wave of urgent email alerts deluged top officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission. On Wall Street, NYSE officials scrambled to isolate the source of the bizarre trades. Meanwhile, across the Hudson River, in the Jersey City offices of a midsize financial firm called Knight Capital, panic was setting in. A program that was supposed to have been deactivated had instead gone rogue, blasting out trade orders that were costing Knight nearly $10 million per minute. And no one knew how to shut it down. At this rate, the firm would be insolvent within an hour. Knight's horrified employees spent an agonizing 45 minutes digging through eight sets of trading and routing software before they found the runaway code and neutralized it."
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" ... buying a stock at $1.00 and selling it at $1.0001, for example. Do this 10,000 times a second and the proceeds add up. Constantly moving into and out of securities for those tiny slivers of profit—and ending the day owning nothing—is known as high-frequency trading.

This rapid churn has reduced the average holding period of a stock: Half a century ago it was eight years; today it is around five days."
READ FULL ORIGINAL POST AND MORE HERE 

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