Flash crash on Wall Street
This article from the Huffington post blames Thursday sudden
market crash on Wall Street on High Frequency Traders. It is a must read.
Secretive Speed Traders In Spotlight After Flash Crash On Wall Street
BERNARD CONDON | 05/15/10 12:31 PM |
NEW YORK — If you saw a penny on the sidewalk, would you pick it up?
You may think it’s not worth the effort, but a breed of investors who have been in the news do. Using super-fast computers, high-frequency traders in effect bend down to pick up pennies lying about in the stock market – then do it again, sometimes thousands of times a second.
More than a week after the Dow Jones industrial average fell nearly 1,000 points, its biggest intraday drop ever, regulators are still sifting through buy and sell orders to figure out what sparked it. One big focus are orders placed by high-frequency traders, or HFTs, and for good reason. These quick-buck firms barely existed a few years ago but now account for two-thirds of all U.S. stock trading.
In other words, all those TV pictures of the stately New York Stock Exchange building on the evening news are an illusion. The real action on Wall Street is far away in Kansas City, Mo., and in New Jersey, in towns like Carteret and Red Bank, where HFTs named Tradebot and Wolverine and Tradeworx ply their trade.
High-frequency trading firms, which number over 100, use computers programmed with complex mathematical formulas to comb markets for securities priced too high or too low because traders haven’t had to time to react to the latest data. The computers then buy or sell in a split second, locking in a profit.
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