For low latency machine-readable news, DJ news and Reuters/Refinitiv are probably the best. Supposedly, there are slightly cheaper guys out there for macro news like Hawks (not sure I am spelling it right).
Fastest real time news
- Thread starter pragmatic-trader
- Start date
By the way @pragmatic-trader, HFT algos make money front-running traders (one penny at a time) via the dark pools, not by studying charts and looking for some head and shoulders pattern or whatever.
(Read "Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market", for instance)
(Read "Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market", for instance)
I've worked for a few HFT firms. Never trading US cash equities but futures markets and other stock markets. HFT in most markets has nothing to do with dark pools. It's primarily delta 1 microscalping using orderflow data and sympathy drivers from multiple markets. Execution would be either hitting the market or managing queue position with an alpha signal.
Very little price discovery happens in dark pools in most markets outside of US cash equities. Less than 5% of volume is not lit in most exchanges, so dark pools aren't a factor.
There's other types of HFT strats that aren't alpha driven. They usually come down to abusing microstructure in some way, such as niche order types.
There's also options HFT which I wasn't involved in but that's basically market making around a spline of the volatility surface from what I've been told
None of this is in books btw
Last edited:
@Tradex Read that book, thanks to you. I actually personally remember many of the characters in the book, it was SURREAL!!! Josh Levine, and Heartland Securities, would eventually spun out Tradescape, and the beginning of my trading career. I had no idea of Josh Levine's idealism. He wanted to get rid of the specialist system at the NYSE. Imagine a genius witnessing a bunch of IDIOTS at the exchange, basically robbing people left & right, legally, for centuries. So he created Island, and the rest is history. Then, after me, ALGOs came into the picture. Thanks to the book, I have adjusted my trading to their presence. They are like machine guns, killing retail traders, but I am hiding way beyond the "machine gun" action!!!
Yeah, out of all books written by clueless authors, this is is the most clueless (I read it on the plane way back in 2013 or something).
Dark pools are specialized liquidity venues, offering larger players a way to minimize their impact. While HFTs do exploit the dark tape delay via various sniffing techniques (the first rule of canaries is that you don't talk about canaries), it is a small part of the overall HFT world.
See comment above...
I highly doubt it, you have met the people mentioned in the book. I have. It's not clueless, as I lived through it.
PS. Fuck. YOU are the clueless one!
Sure, these dark pools and HFT algos exist for the benefit of mankind.
Sorry, my mistake.
Last edited:
No, I have not nor would I opine on their character. My comment was primarily about the author (Scott Patterson) who has nearly zero clue about the world he's describing. That makes this books about as useful for understanding the equity market microstructure as watching Top Gun for understanding the US Air Force.
[edit] in fact, "Flash Boys" is a better book for that, which is saying a lot
Really? What do you think is the role of dark pools in the market then? Why do you think players with large orders prefer (or used to prefer, for various reasons) them over lit venues?