Quote from propseeker:
there are a lot of misconceptions in this thread, but the major one i see getting thrown around is that lack of transparency is the fault of hft's who through the use of 'hft tools', namely darkpools, obfuscate liquidity/activity.
so, to clarify, a little history... darkpools came into existence at the behest of the buyside, ie the large institutions that mange investor capital: pension funds, mutual funds, endowment funds, etc, and these are the primary users of these pools. it was THESE institutions that demanded obfuscation and transparency reduction so that the large price impact in moving orders through the public markets could be reduced. in response to this demand, agency-only brokers (ones with no proprietary flow, ie commission-centric) created products which would allow for institutional traders to find other institutional liquidity outside of the public markets in an anonymous and low information leakage venue. examples of these initial products which make-up the bulk of darkpool volume even today are liquidnet, posit, pipeline, instinet cbx, nyfix millenium, and blockalert. many MANY more have spawned, but those are the most widely used and known.
hft's participation in this space is a combination of market making and arbitrage against this institutional flow. the same that would occur in the public markets if this flow were routed there. in addition, hft's make markets against this flow and the public markets, aligning prices based on what they're able to pick up from these pools.
in the past, all short term traders, in one form or another, were able to trade against or with this flow. however, due to the large transition of this flow to dark pools (30-50% by some estimates), and due to its inherent complexity and now its great numbers (upwards of 50 different pools), the only ones who have been efficiently able to capitalize on it are a pretty sophisticated segment of hft's. the boon in this segment, profit-wise, is largely due to the low amounts of competition previously found in these pools. however, as they become more widely known, competition increases and imo has become quite the crowded trade.
what these facts point to though, is that it becomes apparent that the backlash against hft's can find its source in the buyside (the largest and most powerful market segment as a group). while some hft's may be well capitalized, some may be highly technical, or others exceedingly clever. what they all are for sure, is the minority. and that's very important to keep in mind, because what they essentially have been doing, through arbitrage, is bringing transparency to a market which has none. this reduction of transparency, makes them the enemy of the buyside, and the lobbying for regulation and negative propaganda of these traders find its source here.
it's up to everyone to decide whether it's worth their time to point fingers or not. so if you have decided its worth your time, just make sure you point it at the right people.
Computer assisted trading made the markets too fast for them to keep up and they whined to high heaven about the death of the pits.