Commentaries
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SEC’s flash in the pan
Securities regulators will often settle for the proverbial low-hanging fruit — prosecuting easy cases that don’t make a big difference in the way Wall Street operates. But it does give the appearance they’re doing something.
And so it is with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposal to stamp out flash trading, an unsavory practice that has permitted some high-frequency trading desks to get a millisecond sneak peak at market trade orders.
Banning flash trading certainly makes sense, because there’s no reason that trading firms with lightning-fast, computer-driven buy and sell programs should get an advantage over the rest of the market.
But the furor over flash trading has always been something of a sideshow because it affects a minuscule percentage of the tens of millions of high-frequency stock trades made each day.
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The Wall
