How Everybody Pays The Price Of Wall Street’s Unregulated High-Frequency Trading

During an appearance on CNBC yesterday, Charlie Munger, deputy to billionaire investor Warren Buffett, had some harsh words for high-frequency trading, the practice used by huge financial firms to trade stocks in milliseconds. “Take the rapid trading by the computer geniuses with the computer algorithms,” said Munger. “Those people have all the social utility of a bunch of rats admitted to a granary.”

As a new report from Demos makes clear, high-frequency trading definitely is the equivalent of admitting rats to a granary, as it extracts value for traders but without bolstering investment. The price of that is ultimately paid by consumers:

The increasing inefficiency of the Capital Intermediation process is in part attributable to the trading practices of [high-frequency traders] HFTs, which generate high trading volume and no investment. The cost to the system is generated by several factors. First, the illusion of market liquidity provided by HFT volume leads to the inherent instability of market pricing mechanisms. In addition, aggressive HFT tactics mislead market participants in terms fundamental price. Finally, Dark Pools, trading venues that exist because of HFTs, impair price discovery.

All of these distortions extract value for the HFTs. Investors pay the cost initially because their investments are less valuable in conditions of chronic price distortion. However, investors must compensate for the additional cost that results from the extracted value by adjustment of price. This price adjustment is paid for by the consumers of capital.

High-speed trading now makes up more than half of the stock market’s volume. As this chart from the research firm Nanex shows, high-frequency trading has exploded since 2007, spiking in the aftermath of the Great Recession:

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted yesterday to draft new rules to rein in high-frequency trading. Doing so would both drive investment to productive sectors of the economy while removing dangerous volatility from the market like that which caused 2010's “flash crash.”

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GOP Rep. To Introduce Bill Repealing New Rule Against Risky Bank Trading

Rep. Dan Campbell (R-CA), in a smart move, wants to require the biggest banks to hold more capital against potential losses (meaning they have a bigger cushion, and thus less potential need for a bailout, if the economy goes south). However, he plans to pair his legislative push for higher capital requirements with the repeal of two other important parts of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law:

U.S. Representative John Campbell plans to offer legislation aimed at reducing the size of “too- big-to-fail” banks by requiring them to hold more capital including long-term debt. [...]

His legislation would also repeal Dodd-Frank’s heightened standards for systemic institutions and its ban on proprietary trading, known as the Volcker rule. Campbell said that with additional capital requirements, a ban on proprietary trading would be unnecessary.

The first measure Campbell wants to repeal allows regulators to place more stringent regulations on the biggest banks, making them adhere to even stricter requirements than their competitors that are small enough to be allowed to fail. The GOP has wanted to do away with this provision for years, which amounts to ignoring the problem of too-big-to-fail, not mitigating it.

Campbell’s bill would also repeal the Volcker Rule, which is meant to prevent the biggest banks from engaging in trading for their own benefit taxpayer-backed dollars. Congressional Republicans have done the bidding of the financial services industry by watering this rule down to a shell of its former self, but it still would help reduce some of the risky practices that contributed to the financial crisis.

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Democratic Rep. Pushes Regulators To Limit High-Frequency Trading

High-frequency trading — using computer algorithims to trade stocks by the millisecond — has exploded in recent years. One Democratic Rep. is urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to do something about it, using a law that he authored more than two decades ago:

Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who has waged a decades-long struggle against computerized trading sent the SEC a hint: The power to curb high-frequency trading has been within its grasp all along.

In his letter, Markey described a law he co-sponsored in 1989 to increase the agency’s power to regulate computerized trading, a precursor to HFT that employed computer programs to make trading decisions without the participation of conscious humans. The law lets the SEC “limit practices which result in extraordinary levels of volatility,” according to Markey’s citation.

Markey, nudging further, added: “If the commission simply makes a finding that the markets are currently in a period of extraordinary market volatility and that HFT is reasonably certain to engender such levels of volatility, the Commission can immediately promulgate rules that restrict or eliminate the practice.”

This chart from the research firm Nanex illustrates how high-frequency trading has grown since 2007, spiking in the aftermath of the Great Recession:

High-speed trading now makes up more than half of the stock market’s volume. During one week in October, one trader alone made 4 percent of the stock market’s trades. As Reuters’ Felix Salmon noted, “The stock market is clearly more dangerous than it was in 2007, with much greater tail risk; meanwhile, in return for facing that danger, society as a whole has received precious little utility.”

In 2010, the Chicago Federal Reserve warned the SEC about the perils of high-speed trading. If Markey is right, the SEC has had the power to do something about it all along.

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