3 ms·

I know a lot of people at major investment firms and not one of them trades HFT. I'd assume HFT is an extremely small percentage of the overall market in terms

• confluence 14y ago
  HFT is massive volume over the same capital structure (e.g. same 1% of money being risked at any one time - just many times a day).
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• theorique 14y ago
  If they are trading any stocks at all, they will be using essentially the same systems as HF traders. Any big broker-dealer ('big' in terms of quantity of orders processed) will be a high frequency trader by definition, because they aggregate large quantities of customer order flow, process it rapidly, and send the orders out in rapid succession.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
• beagle3 14y ago
  it might be 1% of the average position size (and thus margin), and still account for 30% of the trades. In "long term trading", you buy 100,000 shares and weight, locking down margin big enough for 100,000 shares. You sell it after a month. In "hft", you buy one share, and sell it. You repeat that 100,000 times in one day. If you did this smartly, you come up with some profit, and you only need enough capital to have a margin for 1 share. Furthermore, at the end of the moneht, the hft guy had 20 times as much volume (assuming 20 trading days in a month), which is why the exchange loves them so much (they live off volume!), and why the exchanges will never let hft be regulated out of existence.