20. The Tide Turns

Eric Scott Hunsader, a man who few on Wall Street or in Washington, DC, had ever heard of, helped change the tenor of the debate on high-frequency trading (HFT) with a sensational charge in June 2010 that was picked up by major news media. Hunsader, a self-made software and stock market expert, and Jeffrey Donovan, one of his company’s software engineers, had analyzed trading data for May 6 across all the markets and exchanges and concluded that traders had deliberately slowed the consolidated tape that fateful day by flooding it with thousands of orders minutes before the Flash Crash occurred, possibly causing the dramatic dislocation. Further research by Hunsader indicated the traders played this game on a daily basis so ...

Get Crapshoot Investing: How Tech-Savvy Traders and Clueless Regulators Turned the Stock Market into a Casino now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.