Financial news TV does two things well: commentary on theequities市场和喊叫。Michael Lewis的高度娱乐宣传通过本周的电缆网络跳过了大量的后者，几乎没有深入了解前者。刘易斯提出了一个呼喊的前提是为了踢掉一周 - “市场被操纵”，他大胆地宣布在CBS的中60分钟— and was dutifully handed three days of shouting in reply. From early on Monday morning, as Lewis has toured the media to promoteFlash Boys：华尔街反抗, which looks at high frequency trading and the rise of new alternative trading venueIEX GROUP.，金融有线电视的激怒Pachyders已经排队，告诉他他的新书有多不错且危险。它已经为毫无意义的辩论和伟大的电视。
Lewis’s week began on Sunday night in friendly, obliging, soft-focus territory:60分钟通过15分钟的碎片推出了这本书，它的数据中心具有很多摇晃，手持式浏览镜头，旨在与世界境内最终威胁的声音，“成千上万的机器人进行了交易电脑。”“克隆攻击”主题在初期继续 - “市场：男人与机器“在周二的辩论中是CNBC的底层综次求和。高频交易员，交易所和兴趣团体如现代市场主动快速动员回应，拍摄Twitter和其他媒体击落书的中央索赔。与此同时，刘易斯被喧嚣的漫画胜利主义席卷了每日展示到了冰冷的，左岸黑暗的面试与查理升到了一套彭博电视。到星期三结束时，随着刘易斯在Luffed上的活力下，衬衫没有被击倒的中间和头发在角度上推开，很少在电视屏幕上瞥见，他的第15次威士忌的失败马戏团小丑的崎岖空气并准备放弃。
The highlight of the week was the appearance of William O’Brien, president of BATS Global, on CNBC on Tuesday alongside Lewis andBrad KatsuyamaIEX的首席执行官，以奥布莱恩在刘易斯多次大喊大叫的交易所：“你从未去过蝙蝠！你永远不会来！“从这一切出现了两件事：第一，任何人都是完全的 - 作者，传统的交换运营商，替代交流运营商，通用市场参与者 - 以任何一种清晰度阐明他对高频交易的立场是什么;其次，金融记者（我不排除自己）的石化不确定性，因为他们试图理解这个问题。
星期三早上，斯蒂芬妮·罗格和埃里克斯施塔尔举办了刘易斯，克松巴和Manoj Narang., chief executive of Tradeworx, on Bloomberg TV; the discussion eventually degenerated into a straight shoot-out between Narang and Katsuyama, the journalist-author and journalist-presenters sitting off to the side in timid, overwhelmed silence as the air thickened with arcane market jargon. At one point, after Narang had finished one particularly tortuous sentence, Katsuyama conceded, “I have no idea what he just said.” Nothing better captures the complexity of, and confusion over, high frequency trading and market structure — a highly technical tangle of participants, technologies, protocols and laws — than that image of two industry veterans venting their umbrage at each other through words that neither could understand. The chaos of this week’s interviews has offered yet another glimpse into our ongoing inability to make sense of financial complexity.
The attempts to untangle the debate in writing, it’s true, have been more successful. But who is reading?tabbforum., a popular capital markets discussion site, has had a new think piece up seemingly every morning this week with some variation on the title “No, [Misinformed Regulator, Journalist or Alternative Exchange Operator’s Name Goes Here], High Frequency Trading Is Not Bad for the Markets.” These pieces have been subtle, difficult, long and impassioned — and have almost certainly not been read by anyone who will want to buy Lewis’s book.
But put all that aside for one moment. Never mind for now that the big systemic risks in the financial system today are elsewhere, in areas like money market mutual funds, clearinghouses or practices that receive little attention, like collateral transformation. No one doubts that high frequency trading, especially when the algorithms on which it depends malfunction, has the ability to disrupt markets, even if only in a comparatively insignificant way. Rogue algos were the cause, in different ways, of the “闪存崩溃“2010年5月和Knight Capital Group崩溃of August 2012. But Lewis’s book focuses less on the risk of short-term market failures that high frequency trading intensifies than on the simple fairness of trading at high speed and whether high frequency traders profit at the expense of the less nimble directional traders that serve the ordinary retail investor.
这些论点在多年来一直存在，并且在媒体和监管机构中都经过彻底通风和争论。High frequency trading was a big deal when it was still relatively new, around 2007 to 2009, but its market influence and the money its proponents make are both waning: TABB Group expects high frequency trading revenue from U.S. equity trading to be just $1.3 billion this year, compared with more than $7 billion in 2009, and the high-speed firms’ share of the market by volume is today by most estimates less than 50 percent, after being as high as 70 percent only a few years ago. For Lewis to publish a book now seems to make him tragically late to the ball.
Each party outraged by the publication of the book has been outraged for different reasons, but for the journalists, nothing has cut as hard as the conviction that Lewis has simply breezed in and told a story, to far more dramatic effect, that they themselves have been diligently reporting for years. Each pointed, hard-scribbling journalistic rebuttal of the claims in Lewis’s book — and there have been many — has been born of that essential indignity: We reported this first!
这是一个非常令人怀疑的是，这一周的财务会有什么Telenovela.. The next episode promises not so much action as a kind of policy nihilism. IEX will go back to being a small, albeit innovative and cleverly marketed, exchange in an already-crowded universe of U.S. exchanges; the regulators will discover nothing they haven’t already found in the five years that high frequency trading has been on the reform radar; and the secular decline of high frequency trading will continue, with the trading firms themselves ?locked in a struggle to squeeze profit out of a marketplace where spreads are tightening further and the arbitrage offered by information asymmetry is continually being leached away.
Ultimately, Lewis’s TV week has not said much about high frequency trading except that people like arguing about high frequency trading. Which maybe proves in the end that it was a tidy bit of business to write the book in the first place.
Follow Aaron Timms on Twitter at@aarontimms.