Video Of Half A Second Of High Frequency Trading Activity Looks Like A Battle In Star Wars

Nanex LLC founder Eric Hunsader presented on High Frequency trading at Wired's Business Conference, and he showed this powerful video of half a second of trading in Johnson & Johnson (h/t HuffPo).

We've written about Nanex's powerful technology before, but this is just amazing. The research firm slows down trading by thousandths of a second so you can see how fast and furious these orders are going out. As Hunsader has pointed out time and time again, a lot of these orders will never get filled and were never intended to be.

"It's all about gaming the system, gaming networking, knowing how things break," said Hunsader at the conference.

It has nothing to do with price or economics.

This happens 90,000-100,000 times a day too. So we either enforce the regulation that exists to stop this (it's called Reg NMS and dates back to 2007) or we accept this as our brave new world.

Here's the video, and you can check out a video of Hunsader's entire presentation (it's only about 15 minutes) below that.

And Hunsader's full lecture for Wired:

Nanex CEO Eric Hunsader: Flash Trading Detective Work from WIRED on FORA.tv