Hedge Fund Wants to Use Atomic Clocks to Beat High-Speed Traders

Think of it this way:

- In the past (prior to HFT), when you put in an order, you know where the market is going to be. How you win is by building better financial models to identify which security to buy/sell.

- With HFT, traders, without sophisticated tools, can no longer trust the market because once they submit, HFT algorithms can shift the market. The focus now is to build a better HFT product to win in the marketplace.

- What Renaissance is doing here is neutralizing the effect of the HFT on their trades. Once they neutralize the "enemy", they can go back to doing what they are great at: financial modeling.

Throughout history, power has shifted with changes in weapon technology. This is just a shift of power back to traditional fund managers from HFTs.

The Flash Boys book is so obviously incorrect. Lewis writes stuff that, if taken seriously, would imply things like major traders not understanding basic price impact. Or major traders having trojans placed on their computers. One anecdote he mentions is something like "I entered an order but didn't press execute. The price changed!" ... As if there's some sort of conspiracy.

Lewis's main point seems to be that it's no fair you can't sell a million shares of something without moving the price.

It is disheartening to see someone get things so wrong, have glaring inconsistencies, and yet get wide acclaim. Just another instance of Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Probably many popular books are just flat-out wrong and we collectively just go on thinking incorrectly.

As far as your suggestion, that's what I was thinking for a while when I first read about them. I don't think it works. Simply cutting over every minute doesn't help, since there'd be a race near the edge. Like eBay, there's zero point in submitting a bid until the very last (milli|micro|nano)second.

It also doesn't work because other exchanges exist. For instance, suppose the interval is an hour. You submit at 0:01, then by 0:30 the price has moved on other exchanges. Obviously you'll want to change your order, and you still have time. But the price is changing on other marketplaces every nanosecond, so you're going to be changing your bids right up until 0:59.999999. Once you allow changing the order, you're back to racing.

If this was the only exchange type, and they all were synchronized, it might work a bit better. But you'd run into another issue: no one would submit an order until the very last microsecond, to use all available information. There's probably more complications too; I don't really know anything about this stuff.

HFT isn't a bad thing, or at least, I've not heard why it's actually bad. Other than runaway programs screwing things up. Which, I think is actually great. That big flash crash was fucking hilarious. People had sell orders in at 0.01 or market or whatever, and they executed, then they got all upset that things worked like they should!

HFT firms don't have customers generally. So they can't front-run even if they wanted to. They'd have to make a deal with someone that does have customers. That's a pretty big conspiracy theory. And it isn't needed because HFT can make money just by seeing what orders hit the exchanges; no need to know about the orders before that.

The reason front running is illegal is because it is a violation of a fiduciary duty. Third parties do not have a fiduciary duty, therefore it's not illegal. "It's front running, but without the violation of the fiduciary duty" is like "murder, but without the killing someone", or "fraud, but without the deception".

> What would you rather have them call it? They can't call it nothing.

Not everything needs a name. Since what you seem to be describing is "reacting to the public actions of other market participants", does it need a name?

Alternatively, if you think something serious is going on, why don't you define it, and then we can name it?