Comments on: Schumer aka Flash Gordon

By: mcnet

mcnet — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 22:17:11 +0000

I wondered about Schumers motives, since it seemed like some of his constituents would be harmed if it were banned (initially I was thinking (obsessively) of GS), but them realized the big losers would be the Chicago boys and it all made sense.

By: f belz

f belz — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:06:34 +0000

I am wondering how fairness and trading got on the sme page. We somehow think that we can control market trading and insider trading with rules. We tried the law and order thing for the past 40 years and filled up the jails and still have runaway crime. This greed thing took a long time to build and it will be a long time until it goes away. Contrary to public opinion the world does not revolve around New York City or the United States. We will still be spinning around telling each other how good we are doing long after the rest of the world has left us in the dust.

By: John McLeod

John McLeod — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:59:10 +0000

Case closed: there’s lots more to the HFT story besides flash orders.

“High-Frequency Trading Faces Challenge as Schumer Presses SEC”, http://preview.tinyurl.com/kojafd , by Edgar Ortega and Eric Martin, Bloomberg, July 27, 2009. “Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the second-largest market maker pairing off buyers and sellers at the NYSE, doesn’t use flash- order systems, spokesman Ed Canaday said in an e-mail.”

By: Michael Durbin

Michael Durbin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:27:32 +0000

Well said, Matthew. Consider also the vast options market where contracts on well over a billion shares of stock are traded each day, nearly all of it via HFT. I know first-hand that many of the same HFT practices in equities trading (e.g., flash orders) also flourish in the options market and you can rest assured many of these are “probably unfair and unnecessary.” I too hope the SEC takes a much wider view than what Schumer is proposing, although it’s certainly encouraging to see him getting involved.

By: John McLeod

John McLeod — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 01:01:24 +0000

“mathemitcal formula” — obvious typo.

Hope you enjoy my poem (seriously meant, although I diverge from your viewpoint). At the very least I recommend “nanopiraña” as more colorful than “flash order”

Also had some harmless fun with FT & BATS (see the update to my May 24th post).

If given the choice between laughing and crying, let’s usually choose humor.