Securities

Dan Keith, MJLST Staff Member

In May of 2010, the DOW Jones plummeted to Depression levels and recovered within a half an hour. The disturbing part? No one knew why.

An investigation by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures trading Commission (CTFC) determined that, in complicated terms, the Flash Crash involved “a rapid automated sale of 75,000 E-mini S&P 500 June 2010 stock index futures contracts (worth about $4.1 billion) over an extremely short time period created a large order imbalance that overwhelmed the small risk-bearing capacity of financial intermediaries–that is, the high-frequency traders and market makers.” After about 10 minutes of purchasing the E-mini, High Frequency Traders (HFTs) began selling this same instrument rapidly to deplete its own reserves which had overflowed. This unloading came at a time when liquidity was already low, meaning this rapid and aggressive selling increased the downward spiral. As a result of this volatility and overflowing inventory of the E-mini, HFTs were passing contracts back in forth in a game of financial “hot potato.”

In simpler terms, on this day in May of 2010, a number of HFT algorithms had “glitched”, generating a feedback loop that caused stock prices to spiral and skyrocket.

This event put High Frequency Trading on the map, for both the public and regulators. The SEC and the CTFC have responded with significant legislation meant to curb the mechanistic risks that left the stock market vulnerable in the spring of 2010. Those regulations include new reporting systems like the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT) that is supposed to allow regulators to track HFT activity by the data it produces as it comes in. Furthermore, Regulation Systems Compliance Integrity (Reg SCI), a regulation still being negotiated into its final form, would require that HFTs and other eligible financial groups “carefully design, develop, test, maintain, and surveil systems that are integral to their operations. Such market participants would be required to ensure their core technology meets certain standards, conduct business continuity testing, and provide certain notifications in the event of systems disruptions and other events.”

While these regulations are appropriate for the mechanistic failures of HFT activity, regulators have largely overlooked an aspect of High Frequency Trading that deserves more attention–nefarious, manipulative HFT practices. These come in the form of either “human decisions” or “nefarious” mechanisms built into the algorithms that animate High Frequency Trading. “Spoofing”, “smoking”, or “stuffing”–there are different names, with small variations, but each of these activities involves a form of making large orders for stock and quickly cancelling or withdrawing those orders in order to create false market data.

Regulators have responded with “deterrent”-style legislation that outlaws this type of activity. Regulators and lawmakers have yet, however, to introduce regulations that would truly “prevent” as opposed to simply “deter” these types of activities. Plans for truly preventative regulations can be modeled on current practices and existing regulations. A regulation of this kind only requires the right framework to make it truly effective as a preventative measure, stopping “Flash Crash” type events before they can occur.