Eric Hunsader: The Financial System is ‘Absolutely, Positively Rigged’
Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, has been at the vanguard of warning about the dangers and the rampant fraud that the rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithims have let loose in today’s financial markets.
While he usually feels like a lone voice in a world happy to deceive itself, he was shocked to receive a $750,000 whistleblower award from the SEC for his efforts. He’s been sadly less shocked to see that since the award was publicly announced, the abuses he reported have only become more extreme and frequent.
Of the situation that led to his award, he says:
The folks at the NYSE were selling their direct feed for north of $30,000 a month versus the SIP which is under a thousand dollars a month. Their customers are not buying it because it has that much more rich data. The thing that makes it worth $29,000 more is that it is faster, but that is illegal. Up until this point they deny that that is the case. And somehow it works. So the exchanges make all their money from their highest paying customers which are the high frequency traders. And the high frequency traders pay the exchanges exorbitant amounts of money to have a slight advantage.
That’s how the whole system works. It is absolutely, positively rigged. There is no question about it. It is rigged on many different levels in many different ways — for example, no retail order ever gets to see the light of day of the stock exchange. That’s one of the many eye openers. People who aren’t pros in the market don’t realize that it’s all a rigged game.
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