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Record W3125813963

High Frequency Traders: Angels or Devils?

2013· article· en· W3125813963 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueC.D. Howe Institute Commentary · 2013
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBusiness, Management and Accounting
TopicSecurities Regulation and Market Practices
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHigh-frequency tradingOrder (exchange)Price discoveryDisadvantageBlameCapital marketBusinessEmpirical evidenceVolatility (finance)Monetary economicsCapital (architecture)EconomicsFinancial economicsAlgorithmic tradingFinancePolitical scienceFutures contractLaw
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

High frequency trading (HFT) is taking world capital markets by storm, notably in the United States and the United Kingdom, where it accounted for about 50 percent of equities trading in 2012, and to a growing extent in other parts of Europe and in Canada. Are high frequency traders angels or devils in terms of the impact on capital markets? Critics claim the latter and charge that they put retail and institutional investors at a disadvantage. Critics also blame high frequency trading for the “flash crash” on the Dow of May 6 2010 and say it has increased the likelihood of such events happening again. A closer examination of these views is in order. In this Commentary, I first look at what HF traders do and how HFT differs from traditional market making. I then explore the empirical evidence relating to the effect of HFT on capital markets, and canvass the policy issues that HFT raises. In the final section, I list some recommendations for policymakers with respect to HFT. After surveying empirical studies of HFT, I conclude that it enhances market quality. For example, it lowers bid/ask spreads, reduces volatility, improves short-term price discovery, and creates competitive pressures that reduce broker commissions. Despite being at a pronounced speed disadvantage, retail traders have realized a net gain from the presence of HF traders in the world’s capital markets. Maintain the Order Protection Rule and Contain the Spread of Dark Pools: To prevent abusive trading practices, protect client interests, and create a level playing field among different trading venues, policymakers should defend the consolidated order book by maintaining and policing the order protection rule and minimizing the leakage of trading from the “lit” markets to “dark pools.” Do Not Interfere with Maker/Taker Pricing Models: Some observers say maker/taker pricing raises higher trading costs for retail traders, because retail trade orders are typically on the active side of the market, and associated fees are passed on to customers. However, retail traders are about as likely to be on the active as the passive side of the market. Maker/taker pricing may raise costs on the margin, but also lowers bid/ask spreads. Focus on Circuit Breakers to Prevent “Flash Crashes”: HF traders did not cause the “flash crash, ” and instead supply liquidity when markets become volatile. Canadian regulators concerned with preventing similar events should focus on circuit breakers to stop market anomalies before they turn into “flash crashes.”

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.094
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.009
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0090.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.036
GPT teacher head0.243
Teacher spread0.208 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it