Boyle and McDougall’s hedge fund doesn’t do high frequency trades, so
to find out more I meet Simon Jones, who was running the quants desk at
a major bank up until a few months ago. He is 36 years old.
“The guys and women who worked with me were the best of the best.
They came from all over the world: from India, Russia and China.” The
job was intense and highly competitive. “Let’s say I have noticed that
the moment the Dow goes up the FTSE goes up,” says Jones. “The first
person to notice that and make a trade can make money but to do that
means getting the data from New York to London and then getting my
trading decision across the Atlantic and me buying my FTSE before anyone
else does.”
In this game speed is critical and that has led to what has been
dubbed an arms race between firms. It has got to a point where firms
have actually started moving their servers nearer to an exchange to
speed up connection times.
In 2010, a company called Spread Networks laid a new direct cable
between New York and Chicago, going straight through the Allegheny
mountains, which shaved a little bit more than 1,000th of a second off
the transmission time between stock exchanges.
For the opportunity to use a similarly fast tube between New York and
London, Jones’s old bank was asked to pay $50 million. “It would have
given us an advantage over others of about a six thousandths of one
second,” says Jones.
This focus on the shortest of short-term gains has vastly increased
volatility. “Warren Buffett owns shares in Coca-Cola and when they go
down he says 'I’m holding on to them because I think they will go back
up’,” says Jones. “But the HFT guy, all he cares about is the next
millisecond. And when too many people start panicking about the next
millisecond that’s when you have a crash.”
The perfect example of such a crash took place on May 6 2010. So many
shares were traded that day that the online trading section of the New
York Stock Exchange temporarily froze and between 2.30pm and 3pm the Dow
Jones lost and then regained nearly $1 trillion. In
what became known as the “Flash Crash”, shares in the management
consultancy firm Accenture plummeted to a fraction above zero . Apple shares went up to $100,000.
“None of us knew what to do or what would happen next,” says Dave
Lauer, a quant who was working on a HFT desk that day. “It was
terrifying.”
For Lauer, the Flash Crash was a wake-up call. “I started to see how
the race to be fastest had left things in a very fragile state,” he
tells me. The following year his wife revealed she was pregnant which
prompted him to make a big decision. “I remember thinking, 'How will I
explain to my future child what I do for a living?’” Lauer quit his job
and last year told the Senate Banking committee that High Frequency
Trading had brought the market to crisis point.
The Flash Crash was partly caused by the HFT strategy of “spoofing”;
making bogus offers to buy or sell shares to flush out the intentions of
rivals. On the day, an astonishing 19.4 billion shares were traded,
more than were traded in the entirety of the Sixties, but hundreds of
millions of them were never actually sold; they were merely held for a
few thousandths of a second as traders tested the waters.
Isn’t there something wrong with a system that promotes so much
volatility to the benefit of no one except a handful of hedge funds? Can
it be a meaningful investment of time and technology? Warren Buffett’s
business partner, Charlie Munger, has described High Frequency Trading
as “basically evil”. “I think it is very stupid to allow a system to
evolve where half of the trading is a bunch of short-term people trying
to get information one millionth of a nanosecond ahead of somebody
else,” he said earlier this year. “It’s legalised front-running.” HFT is
certainly of no clear benefit to everyday investors - savers in pension
funds and life policies.
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