Matt Levine, Columnist

Source Code and Chicken Indexes

Also meditation, white-collar crime, bonuses, DCFs, politics and Twitter mistakes.

November 7, 2016 at 2:19 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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Regulation AT.

The thing is, high-frequency trading just isn't that important. You just shouldn't trade stocks that much. If you do, "high-frequency trading" probably saves you a bit of money, versus, you know, the absence of high-frequency trading; it probably costs you a bit of money, though, versus an ideal market structure. Either way the numbers are probably small. As a subject matter it is full of intellectual interest and fun little puzzles, but as an important issue in American life it ranks pretty far down there. And yet it is the thing that I write about that gets the most intense emotional response.