 | |
| Industry | Financial services |
|---|---|
| Founded | February 1998 |
| Founders |
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| Headquarters | New York City, U.S. |
Number of locations | 11 |
Key people |
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Number of employees | c. 1,000 (2020) |
| Subsidiaries | Latour Trading |
| Website | tower-research |
Tower Research Capital LLC (also known as Tower or Tower Research) is a high-frequency trading, algorithmic trading, and financial services firm.
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(June 2022) |
Tower Research Capital is one of the oldest automated trading firms. [1] It was started by Mark Gorton and Alistair Brown in February 1998. [2] [3]
Tower's internal trading teams are independent from one another, enjoying autonomy while accessing shared technology resources such as hardware, software, and connectivity as well as resources such as business management, legal, compliance, and risk management.
At the heart of operations is the core engineering team, which owns the architecture, implementation and optimization of the trading platform itself. This includes developing systems and tools to access market data, perform trend analysis, run trading simulations, order entry and management, real-time trade support, risk management and post-trade services.
Working together, Tower builds technology and deploys diverse automated and quantitative strategies across a broad range of asset classes in global markets around the clock.
Tower is staffed by employees proficient in diverse backgrounds such as mathematics, computer programming, physics, law, economics, engineering, finance, and more. As of 2022, Tower has over 1,000 employees in its global staff. [3]
Albert An has served as the CEO of the firm since 2019. [1]
In 2014 Tower Research's wholly-owned subsidiary Latour Trading, which sometimes accounted for 9% of U.S. stock trading, was fined a record $16 million for violating the net capital rule. Latour deliberately mis-estimated its exposure to risk and traded despite not holding enough capital. [4]
In 2019 Tower Research was fined $67.4 million for manipulating the markets in E-mini financial futures contracts by spoofing. Tower traders placed thousands of orders for futures contracts that it never intended to execute. [5] Three traders were criminally charged and two pled guilty in the case. [6] [7] Tower subsequently settled a class-action lawsuit for $15 million. [8]
In 2021 a suit alleging spoofing by Tower Research brought by Korean investors was decided in favor of Tower when the court ruled that trading on the Korean exchange was not subject to the U.S. Commodity Exchange Act. [9]
Tower is headquartered in New York, with additional offices in Chicago, South Charleston, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Gurgaon, GIFT City,[ citation needed ] Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Contango is a situation in which the futures price of a commodity is higher than the expected spot price of the contract at maturity. In a contango situation, arbitrageurs or speculators are "willing to pay more [now] for a commodity [to be received] at some point in the future than the actual expected price of the commodity [at that future point]. This may be due to people's desire to pay a premium to have the commodity in the future rather than paying the costs of storage and carry costs of buying the commodity today." On the other side of the trade, hedgers are happy to sell futures contracts and accept the higher-than-expected returns. A contango market is also known as a normal market or carrying-cost market.
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Day trading is a form of speculation in securities in which a trader buys and sells a financial instrument within the same trading day, so 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 may require fast trade execution, sometimes as fast as milli-seconds in scalping, therefore direct-access day trading software is often needed.
In finance, a futures contract is a standardized legal contract to buy or sell something at a predetermined price for delivery at a specified time in the future, between parties not yet known to each other. The asset transacted is usually a commodity or financial instrument. The predetermined price of the contract is known as the forward price or delivery price. The specified time in the future when delivery and payment occur is known as the delivery date. Because it derives its value from the value of the underlying asset, a futures contract is a derivative.
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A trader is a person, firm, or entity in finance who buys and sells financial instruments, such as forex, cryptocurrencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, derivatives, and mutual funds in the capacity of agent, hedger, arbitrager, or speculator.
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Lawrence D. Hite is a hedge fund manager who, along with Ed Seykota, is one of the forefathers of system trading. He is the author of the book, The Rule: How I Beat the Odds in the Markets and in Life—and How You Can Too, which was named a Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Porchlight Books bestseller.
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.
Lean Hog is a type of hog (pork) futures contract that can be used to hedge and to speculate on pork prices in the US.
High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic trading in finance 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 in trading 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 Knight Capital Group was an American global financial services firm engaging in market making, electronic execution, and institutional sales and trading. With its high-frequency trading algorithms Knight was the largest trader in U.S. equities, with a market share of 17.3% on NYSE and 16.9% on NASDAQ. The company agreed to be acquired by Getco LLC in December 2012 after an August 2012 trading error lost $460 million. The merger was completed in July 2013, forming KCG Holdings.
R. Scott Morris is an American author, financial engineer and quantitative consultant. He is president of Morris Consulting, LLC, Chief Investment Strategist of Blackthorne Capital Management, LLC, and was CEO of the Boston Options Exchange from 2006 to 2008. He has also was a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs and Partner at Hull Trading Company.
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 flash crash which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes.
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Interactive Brokers, Inc. (IB), headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, is an American multinational brokerage firm. It operates the largest electronic trading platform in the United States by number of daily average revenue trades - in 2023, it processed an average of 3 million trades per trading day. The company brokers stocks, options, futures contracts, EFPs, futures options, forex, bonds, mutual funds, and cryptocurrency. It offers omnibus and non-disclosed broker accounts and provides clearing services to 200 introducing brokers worldwide. It has operations in 34 countries and 27 currencies and has 2.6 million institutional and individual brokerage customers, with total customer equity of $426 billion as of December 31, 2023.
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.
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