May 31, 2012
US markets in need of repair – Themis Trading heads
A new book from the heads of
US agency broker Themis Trading states that the combination of new regulations
and technology have undermined market structure and prohibit effective capital
raising through stock markets.
Broken Markets: How High Frequency Trading and Predatory
Practices on Wall Street are Destroying Investor Confidence and Your Portfolio, draws on recent experiences including the troubled Facebook and BATS Global
Markets IPOs, as well as the infamous flash crash in May 2010.
Such events, said co-authors
and Themis Trading co-heads Sal Arnuk and Joe Saluzzi, are evidence that the
market has been “hijacked”, further evidenced by continued low trading volume
and substantial withdrawals from stock mutual funds.
“An evolved class of leveraged
short-term, high-speed traders, sometimes called high frequency traders, who
trade massive numbers of shares based on proprietary algorithms, has eclipsed
other types of traders,” say the authors. “Not all the stakeholders have
realised this or the implications of these changes.”
Arnuk and Saluzzi, who began
looking at US market structure issues in 2007, explain that there are two ways
to see stock market prices; the fast, accurate feeds used by high-frequency
traders to “scalp pennies” from investors and the “slow, mispriced” way that
more traditional investors are forced to rely on. They add that the
re-emergence of the for-profit stock exchange model has lead stock markets to
attract lucrative HFT flow, at the expense of institutions.
Such developments put retail
and institutional investors, and publicly-traded companies at a disadvantage,
increase risk, volatility and correlations between asset classes and hinder
capital raising.
“Investors have pulled
billions out of equity mutual funds each month, for nearly two-and-a-half years
straight, which is an indictment on what they think of the market structure.
Market structure flaws are being exposed very publicly. Markets need to go back
to a place that better supports wealth creation and the first step towards this
is to minimise the inherent conflicts of interest that exist throughout the
market,” Arnuk told theTRADEnews.com last week.
While the authors recognise
the work of regulators following the flash crash – which include the
implementation of single-stock circuit breakers, a large trader reporting system
and a ban on naked market access, they remain cautious.
“There are encouraging signs,
but in the past, we have seen many initiatives fall by the wayside.”
Anish Puaar
+44 (0)20 7397 3817
anish.puaar@thetrade.ltd.uk