NYT Flashes Confusion in HFT Reporting »
Posted By JamesMarcus 3 months, 2 weeks ago in Business & Finance
For a brief moment last week, “flash orders” ranked #2 on Google Trends, just below “cash for clunkers car list” and a few spots above “Ryan O’Neal hit on Tatum at Farrah funeral.” Why would an esoteric piece of financial jargon suddenly light up the pop-culture scoreboard? The reason is simple. The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman had said the SEC staff would seek to eliminate the “inequity” associated with flash orders— an order type used on several U.S. exchanges.
What led up to the SEC’s statement, however, is not so simple. It is, in fact, a cautionary tale for both financial reporters and their information-hungry audience of how ominous-sounding but vague information, combined with the public’s already deep suspicion of Wall Street, can lead to unnecessary confusion.
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JamesMarcus
James Marcus is a writer, translator, critic, and editor. He is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut and ...
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Eagle_Eye3 months, 2 weeks ago
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Good article, and it must be interesting with 2 talented minds around the nest.
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I don't like the "modern" stock market, the "Day Traders" can really mess with the market and pull it up or down at times. I feel it does give some more advantage then others and this isn't fair.-
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JamesMarcus3 months, 1 week ago
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Glad you liked it, EE. I agree that the modern stock market can be pretty damn forbidding. As for the surfeit of talent around the nest, I read much of Nina's work but it's often over my head. I usually grab onto a key phrase or so and misuse it until she tells me to stop :).
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deathray3 months, 1 week ago
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kudos to nina mehta for clarifying two strategies that that may work in tandem to optimize the bid or sale price across multiple exchanges, without the intervention of a human trader.
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in my opinion, hft wipes the deck of day traders, who cannot possibly compete in a timely fashion with machine trades, over a wide variety of markets, over various instruments.
flash orders have their own issues, where traders who have access to proprietary data feeds, can use that lag time to make decisions about trading strategies before a human can know that the price volatility has occurred. -
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JamesMarcus3 months, 1 week ago
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Yeah, I don't think the article was denying that flash orders have some thorny issues of their own--only that it was confusing and unhelpful to treat high-frequency trading and flash orders as a single package, when they're actually two different things.
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Oh, and you're right, comparing day traders to HFT is like comparing a horse-and-buggy to a supersonic jet.
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