- Davide Accomazzo, MBA
As a professional trader, you are confronted daily with all kinds of dynamics and situations that require a flexible and adaptive mind. You are faced with multiple variables constantly interacting with each other and your task is to process ever-changing information quickly and profitably. Valuations arbitrage, reflexive supply-and-demand dynamics, and structural changes are recurrent landmines in the typical day of traders and money managers.
We accept this “dangerous” line of work for only two reasons: monetary compensation and pride in being part of capital markets, that transmission mechanism without which innovation and creativity would be prisoners of their own ethereal state.
As a society, we are ready to strike compromises in return for a system that will allow the ethereal state of our creativity to turn into reality. We allow market insiders like market makers, broker-dealers, and others to have small advantages over us mortal investors in order to have them create the positive externalities that help us build a more sophisticated economic system. We give market makers and specialists a privileged look at the order flow (the supply and demand of stocks) in exchange for their commitment to maintaining orderly markets whenever an imbalance occurs. We give systemic firms like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs privileged access to liquidity via the Federal Reserve so that the banking system and capital markets can continue to serve us in our quest to invent, produce, and distribute new products.
But sometimes things turn out more like a bad inland casino rather than a better market…
We may still be reeling from the systemic economic collapse of last year, but new structural changes with potential negative externalities are already at our door.
For months I have witnessed strange dynamics in the way markets behaved: liquidity issues, intra-day volatility, and a constant disconnection between technical, sentiment and fundamental inputs. Markets often go through periods of irrationality, but this time it felt different.
As a professional trader and an educator on markets, my sensitivity level is higher than normal and I immediately began conducting research to make sense of my discomfort. This process pointed consistently to one element: high frequency trading or as I like to call it “the rise of the machines.” Continue reading ‘High Frequency Trading: The Rise of the Machines’
