IS HIGH FREQUENCY TRADING ETHICAL? For markets to work properly and for investors to have confidence when investing their money in stock markets around the world, there must be an adequate amount of liquidity. Investors want to know that when they put their money in the market, they can sell their investment later on. The quantity and volume of trades that use this strategy guarantee a liquid market. HFT traders act as improvised market makers who buy and sell when no one else does.
In fact, the spreads they obtain with their operations are “probably lower than those that traditional market makers extracted from the system before”. Nowadays, especially for companies with a large number of followers, it's relatively simple to buy or sell a reasonably large amount of shares. As shown, the possibility of obtaining higher returns exists solely depending on the strategy. In fact, the Sharpe ratio is more than 200% higher for the 10-second trading frequency than for the 1-minute trading frequency.
The ratio indicates the enormous potential of these strategies and how they can be used to take advantage of market events without spending long hours of work on research and other due diligence tasks. As with many innovations, there is the potential for misuse of HFT. Misuse can be difficult to detect, but the consequences can be severe and harm several investors. The mere existence of the opportunity to misuse HFT does not justify the immorality of the activity.
HFT also provides benefits in the form of liquidity, jobs and market efficiency. However, the opportunity for misuse and its harmful consequences may justify the intense scrutiny and surveillance of HFT. By using these more detailed time stamps, regulators could better distinguish the order in which trading requests are received and executed, identify market abuse, and prevent possible manipulation of European stock markets by operators using advanced, powerful and fast computers and networks. Another set of high-frequency trading strategies are strategies that take advantage of predictable temporal deviations from stable statistical relationships between values.
HFT companies characterize their business as market creation, a set of high-frequency trading strategies that involve placing a limited order to sell (or offer) or an order with a buy limit (or offer) to obtain the supply and demand differential. The complex algorithms used in high-frequency operations analyze individual actions to detect emerging trends in milliseconds. The regulatory measure is one of the first cases of market manipulation against a company that engages in high-frequency operations. HFT clearly increases competition in the market, as trades are executed faster and the volume of trades increases significantly.
The most common types of high-frequency trading include several types of market creation, event arbitrage, statistical arbitrage, and latency arbitrage. In addition to the high speed of orders, HFT is also characterized by high turnover rates and a relationship between orders and operations. A high-frequency trader will sometimes only get a fraction of a cent, which is all you need to make a profit throughout the day, but it also increases the chances of a significant loss. As a result, the quasi-monopoly role of the New York Stock Exchange as a creator of stock market rules was undermined and made the stock exchange one of many exchanges operating worldwide.
The authors of the FAJ article state that the current high-frequency ETF trading system works “well” in preventing large deviations that can spread disruptions and cause instability throughout the market. The SEC stated that UBS did not adequately disclose to all the subscribers of its dark pool the existence of a type of order that presented almost exclusively to market makers and high-frequency trading firms. The success of high-frequency trading strategies is largely due to their ability to simultaneously process large volumes of information, something that ordinary human traders cannot do. It allows traders to find more trading opportunities, including arbitrating slight price differences for the same asset that is listed on different exchanges.
Economies of scale in e-commerce helped to reduce fees and transaction processing fees, and contributed to international mergers and to the consolidation of financial exchanges. In the early 2000s, high-frequency trading still accounted for less than 10% of equity orders, but this proportion would soon begin to grow rapidly. .
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