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Violating The Anti Fraud Provisions Of The Federal Securities Laws By Manipulating The Market Via Spoofing

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exchanges for violating the anti-fraud provisions of the federal securities laws by manipulating the market via spoofing for over five years. Another illegal strategy that has been employed by HFT is quote stuffing. It involves entering and withdrawing enormous orders at a rate which surpasses the bandwidth of exchanges and market feed lines. The orders that they place would be unrealistic in terms of price and would never be fulfilled, for example, an offer to sell for $150 when the current price is at $50. The flood of orders create a delay and increase the lag time for the exchanges to disseminate current price data. The co-location of high-frequency traders servers, allow them to execute trades to their advantage before prices of …show more content…

U.S. Regulation of Dark pools In 2005, the SEC’s responded to the advances in technology and the automation of exchanges with Regulation National Market System (“Reg. NMS”). Reg. NMS required that an order to buy/sell be routed to the exchange with the best price. Since there were multiple exchanges in different geographical locations this exacerbated market fragmentation which created pricing inefficiencies. In order to mitigate the effects of market fragmentation, exchanges and trading venues were required to monitor security prices constantly through the Securities Information Processor feed (“SIP”). The SIP gathered quotes for securities across all public exchanges and exchanges were then required to route orders according to the best price. Although the SEC was trying to mitigate the pricing inefficiencies between exchanges, it actually made the pricing fragmentation worse. Investors wanted to avoid high-frequency traders, and in the past, they would transfer large blocks of securities through block trading desks, but with the new requirements of Reg. NMS, they would have to route their large orders to multiple exchanges to obtain the best price. Faced with the inability of avoiding high-frequency

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