http://hft-shield.blinkweb.com High frequency trading has been in the news more, thanks in part to Michael Lewis' new book, Flash Boys. The deals that used to be struck on trading floors now take place via 'matching engines', computer systems that process buy and sell orders and execute a trade if they find a buy order and a sell order that match. The time taken to complete a trade has dipped into the realm of milliseconds and even microseconds, mere thousandths and millionths of seconds. High frequency trading HFT is a type of algorithmic trading characterized by high turnover and high order to trade ratios. Typically, the traders with the fastest execution speeds will be more profitable than traders with slower execution speeds. Most experts agree that high speed trading algorithms are now responsible for more than half of US trading.
