Nasdaq's flash freeze and the dangers of automated trading
Regulators are stepping in to try to make markets safer
As early as next week, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is expected to release a plan for regulating computer trading, which has come under intense scrutiny after yesterday's three-hour blackout on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Computer trading has exploded in recent years to account for more than half of all stock market and future trades. It relies on complicated algorithms to analyze markets and execute enormous numbers of orders at extremely fast speeds based on market conditions.
And when even a minor glitch occurs, it can gum up hundreds of billions of dollars worth of trades.
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Yesterday's breakdown unnerved investors and traders, and sparked concerns that the market is losing stability. Nasdaq said the problem was a "connectivity issue between an exchange participant and the SIP," or Securities Information Processor, which receives all the information for stock quotes and orders on the Nasdaq. In effect, institutional investors like hedge funds could see trades as they occurred, while retail investors could not, resulting in an unfair advantage for the former.
As a result, Nasdaq had to shut the whole thing down. Here's Floyd Norris at The New York Times:
The Nasdaq blackout — or flash freeze as it's being called — is just the most recent and prominent example of computer trading gone haywire. Just this week, Goldman Sachs Group sent a flood of erroneous options orders that freaked out the markets. In 2012, Knight Capital Group lost $461 million when a software glitch caused the firm to buy $7 billion in stocks in under an hour. And of course, there was 2010's "flash crash," when $862 billion in equity value vanished over the course 20 minutes before eventually recovering.
The Securities and Exchange Commission was not happy about the latest incident. Pattie Domm at CNBC:
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Meanwhile, the CFTC is preparing to release a road map that will look at a wide array of computer trading problems that could distort markets. They include the fees and incentives exchanges give to firms that execute large numbers of orders, and whether traders are using the technology to act as both buyer and seller in the same transaction, an illegal practice known as "wash trading."
But the CFTC will also look at the basic issue of how to control runaway trading algorithms that can pummel the market — a problem that may be based in the underlying software. "Both Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange have legacy trading systems — software that is built upon older software," says Bob Pisani at CNBC. "This software not only has to interact with older Nasdaq software, it has to interact with software from other exchanges and trading systems."
Others say regulators may have to force markets to rely more on a human touch. Marcy Gordon at The Associated Press:
And even members of Congress are getting involved. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said it was time for the regulators to consider "fundamental market structure reforms."
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Carmel Lobello is the business editor at TheWeek.com. Previously, she was an editor at DeathandTaxesMag.com.
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