Quote from Joovenile Jatt:
What you will see tomorrow will be this "quote stuffing," trading in which unusually large numbers of orders to buy or sell stocks are placed in a fraction of a second, only to be canceled almost immediately. In the 5 minutes after the payroll number it will be so extreme it will be beyond belief. This is being done by only a number of HFT nerds, say between 2 and 5, so how can it be possible that they would have an acceptable trade to cancel ratio when they are literally putting and removing 100's of orders EVERY SECOND? Secondly, this is not a way of getting a good position in any queue, by placing and removing orders every 10 milliseconds??? Surely you need to leave the order there resting.
This is blatant order stuffing to slow normal traders systems down to extenuate latency differential to enable HFTs to front run orders.
There may also be an element of manipualtion here as you only normally see this occur on the bid side of the market so whether it is also designed to manipulate is also an accusation that could be labelled at these folks. I can only presume these HFT are, like myself, predominantly long only traders, since this action is occuring 10 times as much on the bid.
I have no problem with buying/selling in front of size, we all do it and it has been the stable food for all us small traders, but when you are deliberately creating a latency differential that allows you to not only benefit from that, and as a result give the big trader less time to react to people buying in front of him, then that my friend is nothing more than theft and is totally illegal frontrunning.
This is why the game of scalping has finished off so many traders because these HFT's are illegally stealing all the orders us small traders want and need to get by, all due to their illegal order stuffing.
Watch it live 7.30-7.35am or any time throughout the day, but remember the faster the market move the more need to slow your systems and hence the higher rate of order stuffing