I enjoy reading your comments. I have read Patterson's book which scratches the surface in "Dark Pools", Haim's book "The problem of HFT" and his regular piece

I enjoy reading your comments. I have read Patterson's book which scratches the surface in "Dark Pools", Haim's book "The problem of HFT" and his regular pieces on Zerohedge. I cannot help but feel that Bodek has an ulterior motive "for exposing the system"... I don't buy his narrative largely because all this so called adverse behaviour is widely described in literature especially in exchange/venue published documentation, support and educational material. A prime example is on page 93 of his book [5] which is a scalping scenario based on inter-market sweep orders (he attributes to a significant loss of capital at Trading Machines) to this strategy... Come on Haim really? you never considered the adverse affects of placing vanilla limit orders? The books [1], [2] and [4] touch on these exact scenarios. I don't buy for a second that he couldn't have picked up a phone and called his account manager/support technician at X venue, or his broker to ask why he was getting an abysmally low rate of fills, or seek colour on orderbook oddities. Despite his lofty background it appears he was out of his depth at "trading machines" and now is attempting to sell his ideas to anyone that will listen. I do commend him though on shedding light over the field and on getting me interested in HFT/execution. For anyone interested in learning more, some books I would recommend: [1] Dark Pools - Erik Banks (2010). [2] Empirical Market Microstructure - Joel Hasbrock (2007). [3] Dark Pools - Scott Patterson (2012). [4] HFT - Irene Alridge (2010). Also if anyone is interested here is Haim Bodek's recently self-published book: [5] http://www.amazon.com/Problem-HFT-Collected-Frequency-Structure-ebook/dp/B00B1UDSS4 http://www.amazon.com/Problem-HFT-Collected-Frequency-Struct...