Measures needed to curb advantage of High Frequency Trading

Warren Buffett

Richard Curran

NINETY to 95pc of all bid offer spreads on American stock exchanges are automatically generated by computers. When it comes to the actual volume of shares sold, more than 50pc of them fall into the computerised high frequency trade category. In Europe, the figure is around 40pc.

It is one thing to have a computer program that tells you to buy a particular stock market index when it reaches a certain level, but it is another, to have tens of thousands of automatic stock trades generated in milli-seconds.