Quote from AnomalyResearch:
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The FIFO creates a free option for those early in the que on the "correct side" of the B/A in a market which is very deep and thick. Free options are ultimately the problem IMHO. One solution not discussed by CME is to thin the que by reducing
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You can guess exactly what people are doing. Do assure your place in line, they'll scatter bids across 6 or 10 price levels. Then they'll pull the bids at the initial price levels until they think the market is turning, then they'll leave that bid in place and cancel the rest once they are filled.
In one aspect they are like floor traders which is that they bid the bid. But in another aspect, they have an assured place in line and a guaranteed fill at the bid with the option to cancel at no cost.
This is an advantage that no floor trader has. The floor has a tradition by which those who make the market get the first shot at fills. However among those those have been making the market, there is no fixed place in line. And even within this floor tradition, front running is still possible. The early bidders have an advantage with respect to getting filled, but they do not have a guaranteed fill at the bid nor a fixed place in line.
To replicate this in electronic markets, exchanges would have to modify the strict FIFO queue and allow some random order matching regardless of the place in line.
The would mean that the above strategy would not result in a guaranteed fill at the bid and the free option would suddenly have a cost to it. However there still would be a statistical advantage to the early bidders, giving a benefit to those who make the market.
Partial order queue randomization has another advantage because it adds a cost to those who use high bandwidth strategies without imposing a $1 fee on users who normally modify and cancel orders.
Also the electronic exchanges and the API brokers could develop a metric to catch those users whose bots are poorly designed and waste server resources. It could even run real time so that if someone's bot flipped out or someone attempted a DOS attack, the trading system as a whole would not be impactedl