Matt Levine, Columnist

You Don't Need to Trade Securities to Commit Securities Fraud

Also dirty and clean bitcoin mining, sports investing, self-driving insurance and sabbaticals.

December 20, 2017 at 2:56 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.

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

High-frequency trading.

Do U.S. stock exchanges rip off long-term investors by selling co-location and fast data feeds and complex order types to favored high-frequency traders who then can trade ahead of everyone else? That question is so 2014 that it is a little embarrassing to have to type it now, when we're practically in 2018. But the U.S. legal system will do that to you: After Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" came out in 2014, accusing exchanges of favoring HFTs in shady ways, some plaintiffs' lawyers very promptly sued on behalf of the aggrieved investors, but then their case was dismissed, they appealed, they proceeded at a glacial pace through the courts, and yesterday they won a tactical victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit: They got their case un-dismissed and sent back to district court for another crack at it. "Remember the evils of co-location," they will ask the district court in like 2020, and everyone will shrug and say "sure yeah I guess that was a thing."