Charles Duhigg Quotes

We can prevent unfair advantage, and we can avoid the destabilizing effect that high frequency trading can have.

I have very little respect for the integrity of the trading on the exchange in most stocks. And I have particular disdain for the fact that the SEC has failed to deal with high-frequency traders who are doing nothing more than taking advantage of inside information, a buy or a sell order, because of technology advantages.

How can you allow the trading companies to locate computers closer to exchanges and flash millions of bids to give an unfair advantage?... Even professionals are losing faith in some aspects of the system.

While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, flash orders are currently allowed because of a loophole in securities regulations that allows for immediate trades.

Short-sellers perform a useful function in the market as conduits of negative information, and shorts often complain that they are discriminated against by regulators.

High-frequency traders are firms all around the world. They're massive investments.

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened.

In a flash order transaction, buy or sell orders are shown to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds before they are routed to everyone else. They are widely considered to give the few investors with access to the technology an unfair advantage, even by some of the marketplaces that offer the flash orders for a fee.

When we had the 'flash crash' in 2010, where the price of some stocks briefly fell to zero, high-frequency trading played a big role in that event.

We built a market at IEX that does not sell certain types of technology advantages to high-frequency traders, and as a result, the high-frequency traders that didn't rely on buying those advantages trade on IEX.

Wall Street wants to keep its schemes too complicated to understand so that the roulette wheel can keep turning.

Even a casual reader of the financial pages knows that microcaps are a perennial headache for regulators and, above all, for investors because they have been prone to abuse by stock manipulators.

We must investigate without fear or favour the so-called 'accounting irregularities' that cause turmoil in the markets and wipe billions off the investments of ordinary South Africans.

On Wall Street, every story becomes known so quickly. They are all so connected that everything disseminates there faster than anywhere.

Fancy computers are engaging in legalized front-running. The profits are clearly coming from the rest of us - our college endowments and our pensions. Why is this legal? What the hell is the government thinking? It's like letting rats into a restaurant.

When the last history of high-frequency trading is written, Hunsader, like Joe Saluzzi and Sal Arnuk of Themis Trading, deserves a prominent place in it.

Securities fraud generally and insider trading in particular should be eminently deterrable crimes.

I always said that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do it at the stock exchange.

Main Street investors, who cannot trade credit default swaps, should not be tempted to trade an instrument with the same risk profile simply because it has been given a different name.

As financial markets continue to broaden and deepen, the behavior of asset prices will play an important role in the formulation of monetary policy going forward, perhaps a more important role than in the past.

When I trade, I don't have an agency problem; I have my neck on the line. When a bank or banker trades, it's not his neck on the line.

I had always been interested in markets - specifically, the theory that in financial markets, goods will trade at a fair value only when everyone has access to the same information.

Financial institutions like to call what they do trading. Let's be honest. It's not trading; it's betting.

The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.

Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.