Tuesday, September 28, 2010

"High-Frequency Trading: Not as Profitable as You Think"

From Deal Journal:

By the memes of financial journalism, high-frequency trading is a “lucrative” practice, which involves scraping billions and billions of pennies into nice-sized piles of dollars.

Now comes some new research that suggests those piles aren’t as big as many had thought.
University of Pennsylvania researchers Michael Kearns, Alex Kulesza and Yuriy Nevmyvaka recently ran HFT simulations of their own, with an eye toward the overall profitability of the trading practice.
They did this by assuming that every trade was a winning one–the “Omniscient Trader Methodology,” as they call it.

Their final estimate–which they consider an almost cartoonishly large estimate–was $21 billion for the “entire universe of U.S. equities in 2008 at the longest holding periods.” Against an overall trading volume of roughly $50 trillion, the final numbers are pretty meek, they conclude....MORE
Hmmm...Omniscient Trader... I wonder if I can still trademark it.

"Here at Omniscient Trader we believe..."