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Exchanges, not funds and banks, are the real culprits in high-frequency trading



March 31, 2014 by · Leave a Comment 

GATA

Fault Runs Deep in Ultrafast Trading

By Andrew Ross Sorkin
The New York Times
Monday, March 31, 2014

“The United States stock market, the most iconic market in global capitalism, is rigged.”

That’s what Michael Lewis told Steve Kroft on the CBS show “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening. It was a clever, if hyperbolic, way for Mr. Lewis to describe the topic of his important new book, “Flash Boys,” a make-your-blood-boil read about the abusive way that high-frequency trading works.

Mr. Lewis’ well-crafted narrative highlights a perverse system on Wall Street that has allowed certain professional investors to pay hundreds of millions of dollars a year to locate their computer servers close to stock exchanges so they can make trades milliseconds ahead of everyone else. …

There is only one problem with Mr. Lewis’ tale: He reserves blame for the wrong villains. He points mostly to the hedge funds and investment banks engaged in high-frequency trading.

But Mr. Lewis seemingly glosses over the real black hats: the big stock exchanges, which are enabling — and profiting handsomely — from the extra-fast access they are providing to certain investors.

… For the full commentary:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/03/31/fault-runs-deep-in-ultrafast-trad…

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