After three years of severe market volatility, and a jaw-dropping flash crash, the financial rock star phenomenon known as high frequency trading (HFT) looks a little burned out. Like many rock stars, HFT seems to be suffering from too many late night parties and some incredibly unflattering press. And its business managers -- regulators and exchanges -- are watching closely for signs of abuse, making it more difficult for HFTs to get away with anything.
HFT has had a good run. Relatively cheap stock prices made it easy to trade billions of shares with limited capital. High volatility gave HFT algorithms a chance to dive in and out of the market constantly, chipping off fractions of pennies until they added up to substantial profits. But they may have partied just a little too hard, causing more damage than just the May 6 flash crash.
According to a new study by physicist Neil Johnson and his colleagues at the University of Miami, "Financial black swans driven by ultrafast machine ecology", more than 18,000 instances of ultrafast mini-crashes have occurred over the past five years -- almost ten per trading day on average. These mini-crashes took place in under 1.5 seconds, with many happening in less than one-tenth of a second, and moved the stock price by more than 0.8 percent. There is some evidence that the faster the trades, the higher the likelihood of an incident.
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