墨西哥证券交易所欢迎高频交易员

In the U.S. and Europe there’s growing alarm over high frequency trading and its potential risks. High frequency traders use computer algorithms to profit from small, short-lived price discrepancies. About 15 such U.S.-based shops comprised 60 percent of average daily volume in American equities in 2009, Boston consulting firm Aite Group reports. These proprietary houses and hedge funds took some of the rap for last May’s “flash crash.”

While U.S. regulators browbeat high frequency traders, Bolsa Mexicana de Valores, the Mexican stock exchange, is reaching out to them. Last year the Mexico City–based BMV streamlined direct market access for these traders and let them house their data servers at the exchange to reduce latency. Starting this month it will route all derivative orders to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Globex trading system, where high frequency traders have a strong presence.

BMV追逐高频交易员有两个原因：它们是在美好时光的保证流动性源，交易所面临其全球同行合并的压力。“高频交易员是任何交易所的流动资金提供商，”集团主席和总统路易斯拉莱兹表示。“墨西哥拥有电子能力来举办和受益于他们目前正在做的事情。”

The BMV’s strategy is working: U.S. high frequency trading firms now represent about 90 percent of average daily volume on the Mexican exchange. To create its own ultrafast trading engine, which will launch in January, the BMV is working with engineers at Carnegie Mellon University and consultants who helped develop Nasdaq’s OMX platform.

But according to last fall’s report on the flash crash by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, courting the speedy can be risky. On May 6, 2010, a fundamental trader executed an automated $4.1 billion sell order of 75,000 futures contracts using an algorithm that kept selling rapidly even though prices were plunging. When high frequency traders and others began selling too, the Dow Jones industrial average lost almost 1,000 points before rebounding. The flash crash lasted 20 minutes, but it didn’t trigger any of the circuit breakers that exchanges use to halt trading when there are unusual market moves.

Javier Artigas, the BMV’s senior vice president of strategic planning, is unfazed. He emphasizes that the BMV uses the same circuit breakers as the New York Stock Exchange does to buffer trading errors, including the one introduced to address the flash crash: a five-minute pause after a price drop of 10 percent or more.

The exchange is also following how U.S. regulators interpret the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which may require hedge funds that have at least $150 million in assets to report their positions and strategies. If that happens, increased operational costs could reduce high frequency trading.

“人们对高频交易者的关注，对市场增加了市场的高频交易员，”墨西哥养老基金41亿美元的总部互联网公司的总部投资组合经理Benjamin Souza表示。“他们增加了深度和流动性。”Souza解释说，高频交易员的影响力仅限于最大的名字 - 例如墨西哥最大的电话提供商，AméricaMóvil - 因为它们从非常液体市场中的低效率下利润。

That may point to concentration risk. But Homero Elizondo, a risk manager at Monterrey-based Afore InverCap, says the BMV needn’t worry about a repeat of May 6. Aite Group cofounder and managing partner Sang Lee agrees. Lee says the main reason for the flash crash was that the U.S. equities market is highly fragmented, with the largest venue, NYSE Euronext, accounting for just 25 percent of trading. “But if you have a single exchange dominating the marketplace, it’s difficult to run into a situation where you don’t know why certain types of moves are happening.”

Noting the speed at which markets react, Afore InverCap’s Elizondo thinks anyone who blames high frequency traders for the flash crash has “a very narrow view of the problem that day.” Rather than focusing on trading errors, he says, regulators should consider circuit breakers that get triggered by smaller price changes in times of relative stability. “It would be very helpful to have lower triggers to prevent people from selling or buying out of irrational decisions like fear or greed.”