Saturday, July 19, 2014

HFT: Wall Street's Zero Day Virus

I just read this article about a hacker attack on the Nasdaq, called "How Russian Hackers Stole the Nasdaq"You can't be serious. Russians didn't steal the fucking Nasdaq, they wrote the Nasdaq. High Frequency Trading (HFT) is the biggest zero day computer virus in the history of mankind. It's Skynet...

HFT Fails Every Single Day
The irony can't be overlooked. Dunces in government are so worried about the external attack vector, they are totally ignoring the internal attack vector i.e. Wall Street

"Dennis Dick, a proprietary trader at Bright Trading in Detroit, said he stopped tracking them because they happen so frequently."

"Stock exchanges don't publicly release data about these mini crashes -- when a stock rapidly plunges then rebounds -- but most active traders say there are at least a dozen a day."

Skynet has never been system tested. Ever. There have been no major market dislocations of any consequence for five years straight. No high volume sell-offs. 

Today's "regulators" know that HFT is a latent disaster. The risks have are well documented on ZeroHedge, in numerous books etc. However, since HFT is the greatest source of revenue for the newly privatized exchanges, "everyone" just looks the other way. 

"While the withdrawal of a single participant may not significantly impact the entire market, a liquidity crisis can develop if many market participants withdraw at the same time," the report from the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission said."

"machines don't feel obligated to step in during a crisis."

No shit. 

Wall Street's greatest enemy is its own self-imploding greed. No hacker needs to install malware, HFT is malware.