Day trading is a form of speculation in securities in which a trader buys and sells a financial instrument within the same trading day, such that all positions are closed before the market closes for the trading day to avoid unmanageable risks and negative price gaps between one day's close and the next day's price at the open. Traders who trade in this capacity are generally classified as speculators. Day trading contrasts with the long-term trades underlying buy and hold and value investing strategies. Day trading can be considered a form of gambling. It is made easier using day trading software.
Algorithmic trading is a method of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading attempts to leverage the speed and computational resources of computers relative to human traders. In the twenty-first century, algorithmic trading has been gaining traction with both retail and institutional traders. It is widely used by investment banks, pension funds, mutual funds, and hedge funds that may need to spread out the execution of a larger order or perform trades too fast for human traders to react to. A study in 2019 showed that around 92% of trading in the Forex market was performed by trading algorithms rather than humans.
An automated trading system (ATS), a subset of algorithmic trading, uses a computer program to create buy and sell orders and automatically submits the orders to a market center or exchange. The computer program will automatically generate orders based on predefined set of rules using a trading strategy which is based on technical analysis, advanced statistical and mathematical computations or input from other electronic sources.
Market manipulation is a type of market abuse where there is a deliberate attempt to interfere with the free and fair operation of the market; the most blatant of cases involve creating false or misleading appearances with respect to the price of, or market for, a product, security or commodity.
In finance, a dark pool is a private forum for trading securities, derivatives, and other financial instruments. Liquidity on these markets is called dark pool liquidity. The bulk of dark pool trades represent large trades by financial institutions that are offered away from public exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, so that such trades remain confidential and outside the purview of the general investing public. The fragmentation of electronic trading platforms has allowed dark pools to be created, and they are normally accessed through crossing networks or directly among market participants via private contractual arrangements. Generally dark pools are not available to the public, but in some cases they may be accessed indirectly by retail investors and traders via retail brokers.
Bats Global Markets is a global stock exchange operator based in Lenexa, Kansas, with additional offices in London, New York, Chicago, and Singapore. Bats was founded in June 2005, became operator of a licensed U.S. stock exchange in 2008 and opened its pan-European stock market in October 2008. As of February 2016, it operated four U.S. stock exchanges, two U.S. equity options exchanges, the pan-European stock market, and a global market for the trading of foreign exchange products. Bats is now owned by Cboe Global Markets.
High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic financial trading characterized by high speeds, high turnover rates, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverages high-frequency financial data and electronic trading tools. While there is no single definition of HFT, among its key attributes are highly sophisticated algorithms, co-location, and very short-term investment horizons. HFT can be viewed as a primary form of algorithmic trading in finance. Specifically, it is the use of sophisticated technological tools and computer algorithms to rapidly trade securities. HFT uses proprietary trading strategies carried out by computers to move in and out of positions in seconds or fractions of a second.
The May 6, 2010, flash crash, also known as the crash of 2:45 or simply the flash crash, was a United States trillion-dollar stock market crash, which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes.
Scott Patterson is an American financial journalist and bestselling author. He is a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and author of Dark Pools: High-Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System and The New York Times bestselling bookThe Quants.
Virtu Financial is one of the largest providers of financial services, trading products and market making services. Virtu provides product suite including offerings in execution, liquidity sourcing, analytics and broker-neutral, multi-dealer platforms in workflow technology and two-sided quotations and trades in equities, commodities, currencies, options, fixed income, and other securities on over 230 exchanges, markets, and dark pools. Virtu uses proprietary technology to trade large volumes of securities. On April 15, 2015 Virtu Financial successfully priced its IPO which began trading as a NASDAQ-listed public company on April 16, 2015.
Nanex is a Chicago-based firm that offers streaming market data services, and real-time analysis and visualization tools. They offer data on all market transactions to their clients who are typically traders and other financial analysis firms. "The company can analyse millions of trades per second."
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt is a book by the American writer Michael Lewis, published by W. W. Norton & Company on March 31, 2014. The book is a non-fiction investigation into the phenomenon of high-frequency trading (HFT) in the US financial market, with the author interviewing and collecting the experiences of several individuals working on Wall Street. Lewis concludes that HFT is used as a method to front run orders placed by investors. He goes further to suggest that broad technological changes and unethical trading practices have transformed the U.S. stock market from "the world's most public, most democratic, financial market" into a "rigged" market.
Investors Exchange (IEX) is a stock exchange based in the United States. It was founded in 2012 with the explicit mission to inspire fairness and innovation by creating technology that levels the playing field. IEX was launched as a national securities exchange in September 2016. On October 24, 2017, IEX received regulatory approval from the SEC to list companies. IEX listed its first public company, Interactive Brokers, on October 5, 2018. The exchange said that companies would be able to list for free for the first five years, before a flat annual rate of $50,000. On September 23, 2019 it announced it was exiting its listing business.
Tactical Hybrid Order Router is an electronic trading platform that manages securities orders in order to dodge certain tactics used in high-frequency trading. The program was created by Allen Zhang while working for the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) in a team led by Brad Katsuyama.
In finance, quote stuffing refers to a form of market manipulation employed by high-frequency traders (HFT) that involves quickly entering and withdrawing a large number of orders in an attempt to flood the market. This can create confusion in the market and trading opportunities for high-speed algorithmic traders. The term is relatively new to the financial market lexicon and was coined by Nanex in studies on HFT behavior during the 2010 Flash Crash.
Ronan Ryan is an Irish-American businessperson. He is the president of IEX, the Investor's Exchange, and an electronic trading expert. As a founding member of IEX, Ryan was a central character featured in Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt. Irish America magazine named Ryan to its 2014 and 2015 Wall Street 50 list.
Hudson River Trading (HRT) is a multi-asset class quantitative trading firm, and more specifically a high-frequency trading (HFT) firm, based in New York City and founded in 2002. According to the Wall Street Journal, it is responsible for about 5% of all stock trading in the United States.
Spoofing is a disruptive algorithmic trading activity employed by traders to outpace other market participants and to manipulate markets. Spoofers feign interest in trading futures, stocks and other products in financial markets creating an illusion of the demand and supply of the traded asset. In an order driven market, spoofers post a relatively large number of limit orders on one side of the limit order book to make other market participants believe that there is pressure to sell or to buy the asset.
Jump Trading LLC is a proprietary trading firm with a focus on algorithmic and high-frequency trading strategies. The firm has over 700 employees in New York, Chicago, Amsterdam, London, Shanghai, and Singapore and is active in futures, options, cryptocurrency, and equities markets worldwide.
DRW Trading Group is a proprietary electronic trading firm based in Chicago. The firm was founded in 1992 by Don Wilson, an options trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and was named after his initials: DRW. The firm trades various financial instruments, including fixed income, options and derivatives, energy and agriculture, and cryptocurrency. DRW has offices in Chicago, New York City, Austin, Houston, London, Montreal, and Singapore. DRW is one of the five largest electronic trading firms in the world. Its major competitors include Jump Trading, Tower Research, Hudson River Trading, Susquehanna International Group, and Citadel Securities.
