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The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

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Re: The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

#41
post #40
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I see it, HFT firms provide liquidity to the market, which is good. They do so in an automatic fasion which makes it cheaper than the past system of human traders. But they also do a speed competition which is mostly wasteful. There may be some benefit for the overall market of faster communications but it is pretty low. All systems have waste, some more and some less. This is unavoidable. So the discussion m…

How do HFTs add valuable liquidity to the market? Does the 500ns faster transaction time for a block of AMZN matter to literally anyone? Other than the two sides of the trade who lost some money to the HFT who MITM'd them.

When someone buys liquidity, they don't do so to close their order 500ns faster. They do it to ensure they can trade at the current market price because they don't want to take the risk that the market will move away from them while waiting for a counter-party to trade with.

Those that are comfortable taking this risk can simply issue a LIMIT order instead of a MARKET order.

Re: The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

#44
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your strategies were implemented in FPGA, they were probably not very complicated (considering the things you can do on a regular CPU). Wouldn't markets function better if every participant had a reasonable amount of time to make decisions?

As a retro computing enthusiast who does algo trading from my Commodore 64, I would very much like more time to compute my trades.

This is interesting. May I ask how do you do it from software poinr of view? As for CPU and memory for sure it is possible, but I'm more interested about how do you connect into exechange/broker?

Contiki, SLIP, PPP, or maybe some ethernet expansion ?

Re: The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

#46
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your strategies were implemented in FPGA, they were probably not very complicated (considering the things you can do on a regular CPU). Wouldn't markets function better if every participant had a reasonable amount of time to make decisions?

As a retro computing enthusiast who does algo trading from my Commodore 64, I would very much like more time to compute my trades.

I'd love to read about you trying to persuade the exchange to let you put that C64 in the colo.

Re: The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

#47
post #4

I was working in HFT as a dev team lead around the time of this article (2105). I remember this was being seriously considered by one of our target exchanges (can't remember if it was Eurex or Globex). Our main HFT trader didn't seem worried - he said that the race would just change from a race to pick off an opportunity into a race to align with any auction timeframe. Back then, our strategies were implemented in FG…

If your strategies were implemented in FPGA, they were probably not very complicated (considering the things you can do on a regular CPU). Wouldn't markets function better if every participant had a reasonable amount of time to make decisions?

The part of the strategy that lives on the FPGA has to be fairly simple, but that doesn't have to be the only part of the strategy. You can do all sorts of deep and meaningful computation on a real computer, then export some settings for a simple event-driven model to the FPGA, updated many times a second.

Re: The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

#48

While I was at jpmorgan I actually spent some time thinking about alternative auction structures (vs the order book model). The current trading model is ultimately a mechanization of the rules from trading happened in a literal trading floor room, and a lot of the structural issues stem from those rules treating time as infinite resolution and the speed of information propagation/light being instaneous. There’s some…

So if we started with a clean slate, no trading room floor history framing our perspectives, how could we do it?

thats that billion/trillion dollar question :)

so I think theres a huge design space, and I think it partially turns into a "mechanism design" challenge to articulate a landscape of transaction / market auction mechanisms that

1) incentivize maximizing market liquidity

2) recognize the speed of light is finite, and have that inform the minimal time scale matching can happen on.

3) obviate/remove the need to obscure large trades as a large number of smaller trades (which is half the value of so called algorithmic trading strategies to institutional investors). This could be via having one design constraint on auctions be that the market impact of the sum of the small trades should be equivalent to the single large trade. (ignoring the issue of the exogenous information of there was a large trade ).

some interesting knock on consequences of these ideas are the following

1) the larger the time scale you're willing wait for the trade to be matched to "the other side", the cheaper it should be to trade! (creating liquidity is valuable!)

2) if you're willing to allow your trade to be "partially matched" instead of all or nothing, that too creates liquidity.

the point being, you start with "what are all the complications of how people do large/complicated trades today that should just be trivial with the right auction" is sortah my perspective. thats glossing over a lot of complexity and other concerns, but those are some high notes.

that said,this is just the tip of the iceberg, and these sort of market design questions are genuinely under studied in my mind, and i could easily spend hours talking about this in greater depth over coffee or such.

Re: The high-frequency trading arms race: frequent batch auctions (2015)

#50

What is the benefit for society of allowing HFT? This is what we should be asking ourselves.

ETFs only exist thanks to HFT

Have you ever wondered how is it possible that when you buy some shares of SPY someone out there is somehow able to collect 500 securities to fulfil your order? Even if it's not a literal action-reaction, that is what must be happening at the margin.

Also, if you still don't believe me, then try to find out how to unpack X amount of shares of SPY (for some non-small amount of X) into individual securities. Can you do it yourself, for example? Whom to call, where's the button for that, who can do it?

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