Importance of High Frequency Trading

Investors must have confidence in putting their money into the stock markets. The market has to function properly, and there must be an adequate amount of liquidity. It is important for investors to put their money into the market where they have the ability to sell their investment at a later time. HFT strategies improve market liquidity. In fact, the amount and volume of trades that use this approach will ensure a liquid market. Furthermore, HFT traders are the makeshift market makers who will buy and sell when no one will. " As HFT trades can make up as much as 70% of the trading volume in a given day, investors have a greater ability

10. Buying and selling in more than one market to make a riskless profit is called

Lack of liquidity inhibits financial institutions from operating at full tilt. One of many examples: Lack of liquidity limits Banks from acquiring low interest rates capital at the FED’s discount window. Not having to borrow from the Fed or other bank because of a banks assets fall below capital requirements is another boost to a banks annual bottom

Having a strategy going into the stock market is one of the most important things that you can do when in the stock market. As a group, one of the first things we did was set up a strategy we were going to use. We found that the best way for us to succeed in this project was to look at weekly tips from professional investors and hand select the few stocks we thought were going to do well in the coming weeks. We would then

Mr. Falcon's report outlined a worst-case situation in which Fannie and Freddie could default on debt, setting off "contagious illiquidity in the market" -- in other words, a financial meltdown. He also raised red flags about the companies' soaring use of derivatives, the complex financial instruments that economic experts now blame for spreading the housing collapse.

Some strategies that I used while going into this stock market competition was purchasing electronic stocks. This was a good strategy because since everyone and everything is starting to go online I thought that some of the more popular electronic stocks would be going up. For example, when I bought Nvidia, it was because they are responsible for designing graphics cards, and since more people are using computers because it’s easy and convenient I thought that the stock would start to climb and I was right. Although I bought if for

When the financial market is disrupted, the Federal Reserve can provide shot term credit to the financial institutions that can not find source of funding. Then the financial crisis may mitigate and the financial system could get well.

The turmoil in the financial markets also known as the financial crisis of 2008 was considered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Many areas of the United States suffered. The housing market plummeted and as a result of that, many evictions occurred, as well as foreclosures and unemployment. Leading up to the financial crash, most of the money that was made by investors was based on people speculating on investments like real estate, stocks, debt buying, and complex investment tools instead of actual tangible products that people purchased or needed. There are a number of dangers that arise when investors make large sums of money that are not tied to the actual value of a product and investors should not be able to make substantial profits off of the misfortune and poor choices of others. Those practices are very unethical and there should have been an increase in government intervention after the financial crash of 2008. The financial crash of 2008 was result of deregulation and male dominance in the financial services industry.

Another illegal strategy that has been employed by HFT is quote stuffing. It involves entering and withdrawing enormous orders at a rate which surpasses the bandwidth of exchanges and market feed lines. The orders that they place would be unrealistic in terms of price and would never be fulfilled, for example, an offer to sell for $150 when the current price is at $50. The flood of orders create a delay and increase the lag time for the exchanges to disseminate current price data. The co-location of high-frequency traders servers, allow them to execute trades to their advantage before prices of

High frequency trading (HFT) algorithms started in 1989 when Steve Swanson worked together with Jim Hawkes, a statistics professor, to program algorithms, predictive formulas for the stock market that were designed by Jim’s friend David Whitcomb, who taught finance at Rutgers University. The idea was to create a mechanical trading

This hypothesis said that financial crises occur in a capitalist economy. It also said that stability leads to optimism and thus more borrowing in stocks and houses. This causes the financial system to go from a stable structure to a fragile one. Overconfidence and a sense of financial euphoria lead to increased borrowing. This same overconfidence is translated over to politicians who decide to relax financial regulations. Excessive borrowing occurs and causes the financial system to be extremely unstable. Minsky emphasized the fact that our financial system is inherently unstable. People contribute to this by forgetting the dangers with debt. Through his hypothesis, he was able to predict that another financial crisis like 1929 was going to occur

Financial panics- a sudden and widespread disruption of the financial markets that occurs when people suddenly lose faith in the liquidity of financial institutions and markets.

A large financial firm presents systemic risks due to its “interconnectedness, leverage, and its tendency to finance long-term assets with short-term debt.” The systemic risk associated with Money Market Mutual Funds, became glaringly obvious when Reserve Primary Fund, a MMMF, had “broken the buck”. This drop in value of shares from $1.00 to $0.97 spread panic to other MMMFs and created the systemic risk that “the failure of a single entity…can cause a cascading failure” of the entire financial system. Another systemic risk posed by MMMF is that associated with the withdrawals by investors from MMMFs that would lead to a freezing of the markets. This was especially prominent in the short-term investment markets. When $200 billion were withdrawn from “prime MMMFs”, the short-term interest rates immediately spiked. This spike in short-term interest rates posed another systemic risk in that these interest rates affect the entire market and not just one industry or entity. Another systemic risk issue that arises from MMMFs stems from the very essence of these instruments. MMMFs attract risk-adverse

In the Figure below it can be seen that after the levels dropped, they did not bounce back. The cumulated order imbalances curves can be interpreted as a signal of a less dynamic market (a decline in liquidity) after the stressful events. \\

Even there are perfect substitutes, the risk that pessimistic traders driving down stock price more is possible in short run and this forces arbitrageurs close their positions leading to bigger loss. According to Shleifer and Visny (1997) , this situation is highly possible. Shleifer and Visny (1997) argued