Algo Trading
Algorithmic trading
Algorithmic trading, also called automated trading, black-box trading, or algo trading, is the use of electronic platforms for entering trading orders with an algorithm which executes pre-programmed trading instructions whose variables may include timing, price, or quantity of the order, or in many cases initiating the order by a “robot”, without human intervention. Algorithmic trading is widely used by investment banks, pension funds, mutual funds, and other buy-side (investor-driven) institutional traders, to divide large trades into several smaller trades to manage market impact and risk. Sell side traders, such as market makers and some hedge funds, provide liquidity to the market, generating and executing orders automatically.
A special class of algorithmic trading is “high-frequency trading” (HFT). One of the most successful HFTs in 2012, AlgoRates.com (a fund run by the financial firm Algo Capital), has posted record profits using their specially designed robots.
Many types of algorithmic or automated trading activities can be described as HFT. As a result, in February 2012, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formed a special working group that included academics and industry experts to advise the CFTC on how best to define HFT. HFT strategies utilize computers that make elaborate decisions to initiate orders based on information that is received electronically, before human traders are capable of processing the information they observe. Algorithmic trading and HFT have resulted in a dramatic change of the market microstructure, particularly in the way liquidity is provided.
High-frequency trading
In the U.S., high-frequency trading (HFT) firms represent 2% of the approximately 20,000 firms operating today, but account for 73% of all equity trading volume. As of the first quarter in 2009, total assets under management for hedge funds with HFT strategies were US$141 billion, down about 21% from their high. The HFT strategy was first made successful by Renaissance Technologies. High-frequency funds started to become especially popular in 2007 and 2008. Many HFT firms are market makers and provide liquidity to the market, which has lowered volatility and helped narrow Bid-offer spreads making trading and investing cheaper for other market participants. HFT has been a subject of intense public focus since the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission stated that both algorithmic and HFT contributed to volatility in the 2010 Flash Crash. Major players in HFT include GETCO LLC, Jump Trading LLC, Tower Research Capital, Hudson River Trading as well as Citadel Investment Group, Goldman Sachs, DE Shaw, Renaissance Technologies.
There are four key categories of HFT strategies: market-making based on order flow, market-making based on tick data information, event arbitrage and statistical arbitrage. All portfolio-allocation decisions are made by computerized quantitative models. The success of HFT strategies is largely driven by their ability to simultaneously process volumes of information, something ordinary human traders cannot do.
Low-latency trading
HFT is often confused with low-latency trading that uses computers that execute trades within microseconds, or “with extremely low latency” in the jargon of the trade. Low-latency traders depend on ultra-low latency networks. They profit by providing information, such as competing bids and offers, to their algorithms microseconds faster than their competitors. The revolutionary advance in speed has led to the need for firms to have a real-time, colocated trading platform to benefit from implementing high-frequency strategies. Strategies are constantly altered to reflect the subtle changes in the market as well as to combat the threat of the strategy being reverse engineered by competitors. There is also a very strong pressure to continuously add features or improvements to a particular algorithm, such as client specific modifications and various performance enhancing changes (regarding benchmark trading performance, cost reduction for the trading firm or a range of other implementations). This is due to the evolutionary nature of algorithmic trading strategies – they must be able to adapt and trade intelligently, regardless of market conditions, which involves being flexible enough to withstand a vast array of market scenarios. As a result, a significant proportion of net revenue from firms is spent on the R&D of these autonomous trading systems.