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'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

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Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#141
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought about your question on my walk home from work today. I decided that as much as jocks vs geeks is a powerful force, a more powerful force is people's distrust of middlemen. People don't really understand that liquidity provisioning is a service that needs to be paid for. They think that if we could just wipe all middlemen off the face of the planet that buyers could just trade with sellers and we'd all save…

We're paying entirely too much for liquidity that value investors don't need. If my holding period was less than a day, that's a buyer and seller who would have found each other without my "help", and I didn't contribute any insight about the company's value, just about flaws in the marketplace.

Feel free to place a limit order for the price you want instead of taking the liquidity from the HFT.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#142
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does no such thing. Market makers prefer not to interact with people that have a directional view as they may move the market. If a market maker gets caught with inventory and the price is moving they will lose money. Market makers tend to be less involved in price formation then other types of investors.

> It does no such thing. Market makers prefer not to interact with people that have a directional view as they may move the market. If a market maker gets caught with inventory and the price is moving they will lose money. Are you claiming this doesn't impact the profitability of those people with directional views?

It depends on what you mean by impact. A market makers role is to provide market participants the instantaneous ability to buy or sell a security. They compensated a small amount for providing this service. If someone is using very poor execution techniques the price could worsen, however most large asset managers and brokers that serve them have quite advanced execution technology. The actual impact of modern market making on final execution price is typically positive relative to not having it due to competition and ultimately a tighter spread.

See Vanguard on this: http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largely because the entirety of latency arb has to do with taking advantage of price differences between exchanges. How those differences are created is largely immaterial. As long as you have multiple exchanges that are not perfectly syncd (a distributed systems problem!) There will be time based arbitrage opportunities.

Not exactly in all products. US equities exchanges have to comply with the nbbo (national best bid offer), so they're required to forward an order to the exchange with the best price. This isn't true for futures, but there aren't any fungible futures in the US. This means that latency arb in US equities isn't true arbitrage. If you see a price level get sweeped at one exchange, you may guess that the others will foll…

I think the point Kasey is hinting at is that the functionality you claim RegNMS requires exchanges to implement is not, due to the CAP theorem, actually possible to do reliably.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#144
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vanguard runs etfs mostly Is there a socially acceptable way to call a person an ignoramus on HN?

Sorry, what's ignorant about that?

Vanguard has something like three trillion dollars under management, only 450Bn of which are ETFs. Vanguard is not the largest ETF provider, but has long been the #1 mutual fund provider. Anyone who rebuts an argument about Vanguard's role in the mutual fund industry by saying "Vanguard mostly runs ETFs" doesn't know what Vanguard is.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vanguard runs etfs mostly, so I'm not sure why they care about support small spreads since they probably do a lot of efp trades (I'm not sure how the underlying prices are determined, but I think they can convert at a set price). The mutual funds and hedge funds who are more fundamental will try and buy or sell large blocks, so they're more affected by adverse market moves from trying to dump $1M of apple. I could se…

> Vanguard runs etfs mostly Is there a socially acceptable way to call a person an ignoramus on HN?

No.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#146
post #49
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mostly lay person, for me it's vilified because my understanding of it is that HFT has a significant advantage over my own personal trading, and that through this advantage HFTs are able to make "more" profits than would be possible without HFT. My brain tells me that some of these profits are likely at my own trades' expense, and that while markets and economies rise and fall, my own profits are negatively impa…

You don't do the kind of trading HFTs do. No matter whether trading is done with hand signals or in FPGAs, you were never going to be making markets. Meanwhile, cost of trading for normal people like us has gone through the floor. And we're only really looking at the last 15 years when we think about trading costs, but even steeper reductions precede that, and it was all brought about by replacing human market makers…

In the pre-HFT era there were manual day traders doing spreading, arbitrage and short-term speculation based on the order book. A famous example would be the SOES bandits of the 90s. They would pick-off slow NASDAQ market makers and offer the shares back out on nascent ECNs like Island to make a few ticks.

Some of them worked for firms as professionals, but many traded on retail platforms similar to what you'd see from Interactive Brokers or TT these days. Still you are right that the average investor never traded in this fashion. At worst, the people HFT put out of work were trading as a profitable hobby similar to playing poker online.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On that case I think I agree with the Matt Levine take that "Back in September I was pretty sympathetic to DRW and after reading the CFTC's complaint. I'll double down on that.†" I guess we'll see what happens. My only point was that some people think all HFT is bad, and here we have a complaint that actually the situation is reversed and it was actually all human market making that was bad. I don't think either stat…

Alright, it's hard for me to explain how sometimes all means all and sometimes it doesn't. But tptacek's comment didn't literally say that every last floor trader was crooked, just that was generally true. And it's easy to see how it could be true. A wink here, etc. The difficulty for anyone to see the size of the order book. I think it's harder to describe how HFT is bad. Most of the efforts in this thread are, we'l…

I don't think people on the floor were necessarily all crooked or doing something illegal, but that market structure doesn't invite fierce competition. You'd see the same people every day and go to drinks with them. There was a real camaraderie between people on the floor, even if they were ostensibly competitors. Think of any community. Most people would probably work a little harder to have a nicer car than their neighbor, but they wouldn't want to see the neighbor's family starve to death in the process. By undercutting your rivals in the pits, you were literally taking away their mortgage payment, and you had to do it to their face. A lot of the locals in the pits were independent, so it was personal, not just business.

You also could see who was on the other side of your trade. Savvy floor traders would use that information to their advantage. If a sharp broker traded with you, you could hedge more aggressively or speculate in the same direction. Most electronic markets are anonymous these days so there's less information leakage.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#148

Was the 30 mile cable necessary to create a speed bump. Seems to me a few lines of code would have worked.

If I recall correctly, doing this through code would trip up on financial regulations. The idea for the 30 miles of cable came from hypothesising/imagining/being somewhere in New Jersey. Rough recollection of a couple of paragraphs in the book. Someone else please add if recalled incorrectly.

Reg NMS says you cannot code a system or intentional device to delay access to a quotation. Nasdaq had tried doing this on one of their smaller markets in software many years ago, but the SEC did not approve their proposal. Geographic or network latency is not regulated by Reg NMS. For example, there is a very small stock exchange that operates out of Chicago, which is many milliseconds away even by microwave vs. New Jersey where most of the equities market trades.

There are a lot of SEC comment letters claiming IEX's delay coil is an "intentional device"[1][2] but the SEC approved their exchange application because they consider the delay to be "de minimis." One area where the IEX delay differs from simple geographic latency is that IEX delays incoming orders, outgoing fills, and outgoing market data, but they do not delay market data from other exchanges. That difference makes it more difficult to "pick off" a stale order on IEX, but on the flip-side, it also means IEX orders get to free ride the price discovery happening on other markets without taking risk.

This delay also raises issues because under Reg NMS, brokers have to route orders to exchanges with the best price when trading through an entire price. Since IEX's data is lagged, it may be showing a quote that is no longer accessible. Brokers would face additional slippage/execution uncertainty if they need to route at this phantom quote and wait 700 microseconds to find out it wasn't there. Canada has exchanges with delays similar to IEX, but IIROC ruled that they are not "protected" quotes so brokers have discretion not to route there if they feel it would harm their execution quality.

1: https://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-300.pdf

2: https://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-16.pdf

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#149
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does no such thing. Market makers prefer not to interact with people that have a directional view as they may move the market. If a market maker gets caught with inventory and the price is moving they will lose money. Are you claiming this doesn't impact the profitability of those people with directional views?

It depends on what you mean by impact. A market makers role is to provide market participants the instantaneous ability to buy or sell a security. They compensated a small amount for providing this service. If someone is using very poor execution techniques the price could worsen, however most large asset managers and brokers that serve them have quite advanced execution technology. The actual impact of modern market…

Vanguard invests almost purely passively, and does not generally take directional views. I agree HFT benefits Vanguard but that doesn't contradict my point at all.

Re: 'Flash Boys' IEX stock exchange opens for business

#150
post #80
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not generally a fan of viewing the world in terms of an extended version of the social struggle from high school, but given that this actually does do a reasonably accurate caricature of human market makers versus HFT firms, this has always confused me regarding HN's reaction to HFT. In one corner, we have sweaty alpha male jocks [+]. In the other corner, we have geeks with computers. The geeks ran the table on t…

I thought about your question on my walk home from work today. I decided that as much as jocks vs geeks is a powerful force, a more powerful force is people's distrust of middlemen. People don't really understand that liquidity provisioning is a service that needs to be paid for. They think that if we could just wipe all middlemen off the face of the planet that buyers could just trade with sellers and we'd all save…

It's not so much distrust of middlemen, as it is distrust of anonymous middlemen. And also automated middlemen. People are happier getting shafted by a person they can see than a bot they can't. Otherwise, they would be hurling abuse at Apu down at the Kwik-e-mart when he charges them 30% extra for a quart of milk just because he bridges time (11pm) and space (down on the corner) to provide liquidity and make it convenient for them.

Part of this is also algorithm aversion (even here on HN) - watch how people are reacting to Tesla autopilot crashes. There is a lot of tin foil stuff about 'algos gone haywire', but I can tell you now that humans fat fingering in the market were both more common and more deadly.

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