Better enforcement of high-frequency and algorithmic trading is required, said a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, The Wall Street Journal reports. More appropriate rules and regulations need to be developed to police the high-speed nature of computer-aided trading styles, added Scott O’Malia.
New rules are needed instead of conforming pit trading enforcement methods to today’s markets. O’Malia has urged new rules in response to CME Group’s probe of Infinium Capital Management’s computer problem that led to a sudden spike in oil prices in February. “The market was tainted and prices plunged as a result,” O’Malia said in a statement, responding to a Reuters story describing how the algorithm ran amok on February 3, incurring a million-dollar loss in about a second.
Will this be applied to high frequency trading in the OTC forex as well? I find it hard to believe as OTC forex price fluctuations do not affect the actual forex prices (still, the market is much much bigger than the retail forex part of it) and CFTC will probably focus on much larger and important markets such as stocks, futures and commodities which actually affect the economy.
This is going to be interesting.
The biggest challenge is that you have no one to regulate – the decisions are being made by a computer that was programmed by a developer that got his order from a mathematician – there is no trader or market analyst in the mix here. So unless they want to regulate the developers to not introduce bugs or regulate the QA team to find all the bugs before they run this in production I can’t really see who are they going to regulate.
– Asaf.