3 ms·
Not exactly - what is being described here are two exploits. The first exploits the difficulty the market has in determining the "NBBO" - the National Best Bid
by elecengin 17y ago
Not exactly - what is being described here are two exploits.
The first exploits the difficulty the market has in determining the "NBBO" - the National Best Bid/Best Offer. This is the best price for buying and selling the stock on all markets. This price is important because the market must route an order to the market with the NBBO if it does not have the best price (due to RegNMS). To find this price, the market's themselves must process the quotes from all the markets. This same process can be done by private companies, and sometimes they can calculate the NBBO faster, and leverage the fact that the market has not yet updated it's value.
The second exploit they describe is much simpler. It leverages the fact that if an algorithm can determine that an institution wants to buy a large quantity of a given stock, the price movement of that stock becomes more predictable. Therefore, VWAP and associated algorithms are falling out of favor by institutions since they are most easily predated. Now, many institutions buy access to custom boutique algorithms tailored to hide the large purchases and avoid predation.
- tptacek 17y agoThat first graf you wrote: exactly what I was wondering about. Thanks for the crystal clear explanation. The second graf is a problem I've spent some time with for clients, and figuring out that someone is shopping a block and jumping in a threat that everyone I've talked to has called "frontrunning", but I don't know what the real name is. I'm working at a lower level than figuring out and trading towards optimal pricing targets, but that aside, I think there's a real future to research into the programming flaws of automated/algorithmic trading systems.