High-frequency trading: fast money on the stock exchanges!
Книга «Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt» журналиста, писателя и трейдера Майкла Льюиса была опубликована только 1,5 месяца назад, но сотрясла весь финансовый мир почище Джордана Белфорта с его «Волком с Уолл Стрит».
High-frequency trading: how it works
Flash Boys Book raised the issue of high-frequency trading (hft) in the financial markets. The essence of this type of trading is that special programs make a very quick decision to buy or sell an asset based on incoming news.
Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, and UBS have special divisions that specialize in high-frequency trading. Their servers are located as close as possible to New York Stock Exchange (and it costs a lot of money) to reduce the time of the signal, so that trading robots could make a decision about the news as quickly as possible and start trading.
Information processing for trading robots is taking less and less time. The most talented and well-paid engineers and IT people are working in this field, and they are essentially creating an artificial mind that is geared to make one of two decisions: Sell or Buy. And the cream taken off the market is worth it.
The scheme is as simple as the world: he who buys first, buys at the best price. And resells it already at a higher price to those who came to the market a second later.
Высокочастотные торговые роботы — зло?
ConvergEx conducted a survey that found that 2/3 or 70% of participants believe the stock markets are not fair to all. 51% of respondents believed that высокочастотная торговля — это зло.
Often the efforts of high-frequency robots are tuned to many different stocks, including stocks of small companies that are subject to significant volatility. This allows you to grab a large chunk of profit in a short time.
In the U.S. and Europe, regulators want to limit, if not ban, the use of high-frequency robots that create artificial movement in the financial market, which is not related to the real performance of the company.
A prime example of this is Flash Crash 2010which was essentially a machine uprising. Some high-frequency robots triggered to reach a level, literally dropping the market for a few minutes, while other robots triggered to reach a price, redeeming the stock and bringing the market back within its range of movement.
"High-frequency technique is the new stage in trading. The Future of Trading.", — считает финансовый аналитик FxPro Александр Купцикевич. «Одни роботы реагируют на достижение цены, другие – на новости, и все они принимают решения молниеносно и разнонаправлено . И рынок все равно возвращается на свои исходные позиции. Если у трейдера есть четкий торговый план, то машина все сделает быстрее».