Bloomberg/Benjamin Bain/5-15-2019
“The go-ahead from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, announced Wednesday, comes after ICE announced in February that it planned to impose a 3-millisecond trading delay on gold and silver contracts. The pause would be the first-ever speed bump for futures, showing that an idea popularized in Michael Lewis’s 2014 book ‘Flash Boys’ to rein in high-frequency traders is gaining more adherents.”
USAGOLD note: Interesting that ICE would choose gold and silver as the two streets in which to install the speed bump. The CFTC says that the speed bumps “have the potential to significantly impact futures’ markets function and quality” and that it would promote more trading through “slowing down high-speed traders engaged in latency arbitrage.” The CFTC, it would seem, is handing high-speed trading a ticket. Hopefully the net effect will be something of a return to normalcy as the advantage of high-speed trading is throttled.
