Matt Levine, Columnist

High-Speed Trading Firm Deleted Some Code by Accident

Even the biggest algorithmic trading firms are sometimes befuddled by modern markets.

September 30, 2015 at 10:55 PM 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 is the end of the Securities and Exchange Commission's fiscal year, as you might have guessed from the rush of enforcement actions finalized today. I count almost $68 million of penalties coming into the SEC's coffers on the last day of fiscal 2015, from three separate settlements with 25 defendants.1443647944672 One of those settlements was with Latour Trading, the big high-frequency trading firm, for what the SEC calls "market structure rule violations."

A popular story about the speedy computerized modern stock market is that it is dominated by evil high-frequency traders who take advantage of market fragmentation and complexity to rip off mom and pop investors. The particular villains in that story tend to be a bit hazy, but surely Latour is high on the list. Latour, a part of Tower Research,1443646027826 is huge,1443646115096 "opaque," run by an eccentric rich person, and has been in trouble with the SEC before. And is in trouble with the SEC again. Surely if anyone is ripping off mom and pop, it's Latour.