A new study confirms that high frequency trading, which already has declined in terms of its yield if not its use, endangers investors and basically turns stock markets into automated casinos where the average Joe can do little but get hurt. The chief economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Andrei Kirilenko, reports in a [...]

The stock market has become a war between algorithm-based robots, a war for speed where the winners trade 10 microseconds faster than the losers. But all sides of this war have armed themselves so well, have reduced the timing of trades so much, that high frequency trading no longer makes much money. Now it appears [...]

One of the areas that Sen. Ted Kaufman and his chief of staff Jeff Connaughton tried to focus on during his accidental two-year term in the Senate was high-frequency trading. The 2010 “flash crash” showed the potential dangers of this fast-growing industry. Consider that our financial system places a large emphasis on where super-computers are [...]

In another example of why normal Americans just shouldn’t play the casino that has become the stock market, a runaway trade bot threw the NYSE into turmoil yesterday: An automated stock trading program suddenly flooded the market with millions of trades Wednesday morning, spreading turmoil across Wall Street and drawing renewed attention to the fragility [...]

It’s Chuck Schumer Day here at FDL News Desk. Schumer, in addition to smack-talking John Boehner on the debt limit, came out with two policy ideas over the weekend, one abominable and one that has quite a bit of merit. See if you can guess which one got more attention. The abominable one, of course, [...]

It would have been easy to miss this the past few days, given everything going on. But are you aware that a panel of experts basically said regulators should consider a financial transaction tax, as the only way to stop another “flash crash” caused in part by high-frequency trading? Regulators should stem the growing tide [...]

On May 6, the stock market crashed and then rebounded in the space of five minutes, a technical glitch that pulled back the curtain on the level of automation and trading-by-computer in the financial system. It wasn’t just that the NYSE had been rigged to the benefit of the influential and the powerful, it was [...]

You probably know the excuse by now. Someone at Citigroup entered a “b” instead of an “m” and initiated a 16 billion dollar sell-off of Proctor and Gamble, leading to a massive bungee jump in the Dow, dipping 1,000 points before bouncing right back and finishing the day 300 points off. The stock exchanges seemd [...]