High-Speed Traders Still Trading Faster than Low-Speed Traders
I find myself unable to get all that mad at New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's weird quest to ban high-frequency trading. It has a lot of things I dislike -- overheated rhetoric, efforts to criminalize things that everyone including regulators thought were fine when they were done, vague unfulfillable promises of level playing fields -- but there's a good point at the core of it. The modern structure of U.S. equity markets is to some extent an accretion of accidental consequences of regulatory and exchange decisions made in simpler times, without complete foresight into how they would play out in today's faster world. No one is really all that stoked about building lasers to beam index-futures prices between New York and Chicago, not even the guys building the lasers.