NEW YORK (Reuters) - Inside the offices of Tradeworx, an emerging player in the secretive and controversial world of high-frequency trading, it's dead quiet as staffers pore over the "tape," financial industry speak for the record of the day's transactions.
Regulators are finally waking up to potential trading abuse.
Is this a stock market or a maelstrom?
Taxis and billboards that advertise the performance of asset management firms commonly use the image of the star fund or portfolio manager to lure investors. Your money is safe with him, or her, the message implies.
Equity trading volumes in the US are now dominated by traders using powerful computer algorithms in a practice known as high frequency trading.
Institutional investors' ability to execute trades of large blocks of stock electronically has dropped notably over the last year and a half-as small trades under 400 shares have increased-with even top block-trading venues seeing a reversal as unlikely.
The pros of high-frequency traders’ participation in the US equity market outweigh the cons, despite the negative press their influence has recently received, according to a new report from US agency broker Rosenblatt Securities.
Federal regulators turned their attention on Thursday to the fast-paced and sometimes opaque electronic trading systems that dominate financial markets, proposing to ban a type of trading that critics contend gives hedge funds and other financial firms an unfair advantage over individual investors.
It is an obscure art of Wall Street, a technique that gives a scattering of traders an edge over everyone else — and the Securities and Exchange Commission wants to stamp it out.
The introduction of third-party cloud computing and data storage offerings has allowed smaller firms to exploit infrastructure resources that were once limited to the largest bulge-bracket firms. DWT editor Rob Daly sits down with Raman Kannan, CTO of Rosenblatt Securities, to discuss how his firm has benefited from these new offerings.