Matt Levine, Columnist

'Hide Not Slide' Orders Were Slippery and Hidden

It's good when the victim of a market-structure abuse is called Trading Machines. Lets you know the stakes.

January 13, 2015 at 12:35 AM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Today, the Securities and Exchange Commission fined the Direct Edge stock exchanges $14 million for violations involving their "Hide Not Slide" order types.1421101250325 Here's a 2012 Wall Street Journal article that comes with basically a graphic novel devoted to how a "Hide Not Slide" order works, and I refer you to there if you want to know how it works. The thing is that you probably don't want to know how it works. But here's the basic idea, without the cartoon of a jumping man in a suit:1421099763770

Simplifying enormously, Direct Edge offered two ways of doing this: