High-speed algorithms have so revolutionized the way stock markets function that laws regulating the markets may be quickly becoming outdated.
“Algorithms able to execute tens of thousands of trades in just fractions of a second are responsible for more than 70 percent of all equity trading volume in the United States,” says Yesha Yadav, assistant professor of law at Vanderbilt Law School.
“Securities regulation has not kept pace with this profound transformation under way in public markets.”
It is not just a matter of the extraordinary speeds at which algorithms can trade, but more importantly, in the amount of control that human traders have to review and correct errors in information flows.
Although algorithms are making markets extremely fast at reacting to news, we have also seen instances of markets going haywire when algorithms trade on the back of incorrect or over-hyped information received through Twitter feeds or the news media, Yadav argues in a recent working paper made available on the Social Science Research Network.
Dummy Trades
“More problematically, traders also benefit where their algorithms deploy strategies that confound other market participants, or that make it more difficult for others to trade,” Yadav writes. “Sending out false signals through dummy trades, or flooding the market with inexplicable but canceled orders can disrupt information flows to the benefit of the strategic algorithmic trader.”
One possible consequence to the prevalence of algorithmic stock trading may be that some traders will opt out of the system and take their assets elsewhere, feeling they cannot compete.
The market relies on fundamentally informed traders to provide high-quality insights into what prices mean. But, where informed investors systematically lose to their computerized counterparts, they may eventually lose the incentive to take full part in the market, or they may invest less in research.
The effect might not be obvious today. However, as markets develop and evolve, it will likely be a pressing question for the next five years.
“Automated markets have little respect for traditional paradigms that have governed markets over the last half-century,” Yadav writes. “As markets change, so must the laws and theories that regulate them. Without this, regulation must become a bystander to the inevitability of innovation.”
Source: Vanderbilt University. Republished from Futurity.org under Creative Commons License 3.0.
*Image of “numbers“ via Shutterstock
