Tag: hft

Technology Has Changed Wall Street, But Humans Are Still In Charge

Technology has fundamentally changed the financial markets over the past two decades. By and large, these changes have been positive – lower trading costs for investors, a reduction in errors, greater transparency and an overall reduction in systemic risk. But recent volatility has reignited a decade’s old conversation about what impact automated trading has on the market. […]

A Conversation With Virtu’s CEO, Doug Cifu

On February 7th I spoke with Virtu Financial’s CEO Doug Cifu.  The conversation touched on Virtu’s history, recent acquisitions, equity and fixed income market structure and the impact of high-speed trading on markets in general and market volatility more specifically.  We recorded the session and loaded it as a podcast on SoundCloud.  Perfect for your […]

Market Structure Didn’t Cause Volatility – At Least Not This Time

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin recently blamed high frequency trading and the Volcker Rule for recent volatility in the markets.  While I love to see high ranking government officials talking about market structure, his statements felt surprisingly uninformed coming from someone who has spent their entire life on Wall Street.  Today I discussed this on Bloomberg TV, […]

Selling Caused The Sell Off, Not High Frequency Trading

Oliver Renick and I had a good discussion about what caused (and didn’t cause) the equity market sell off in October 2018.  I’m a market structure guy, not an equity strategist.  But market structure certainly should be examined when thinking about why markets do what they do; in this case, the growth of passive investing […]

High Frequency Needs High Touch

Originally posted on the Greenwich Blog There is a tremendous amount of irony in the path high-frequency trading – excuse me, principal trading firms have taken from their heyday in the late 2000’s.  We alluded to this a few months ago in our Top Market Structure Trends to Watch in 2017: When I first started meeting […]

Global FX Investors Increasingly Seek Non-bank Liquidity

Below is the press release for my most recent paper examining changes in the global FX market.  The bottom line: big banks will continue to play a huge role, but non-bank liquidity providers will up there game increasingly interacting directly with institutional investors.  Bloomberg News also highlighted our finding that hedge fund use of execution […]

Making Proprietary Trading Public: My Interview with Bloomberg TV

First KCG and now Virtu.  In 2008 no one would have guessed that in 2014 automated trading firms would be publicly traded companies – but here we are.  Investors have a new way of getting in on the profits behind liquidity provision, and the market as a whole has new insight into how these firms […]