HFT Question, page-2

Morning HFT certainly does exist here, and it has the same effect - it impedes fair and transparent trading.

In fact, from when algorighmic trading (the bots) first started, it was the beginning of the downhill slope into chaos, as far as I'm concerned. Then when the algo traders organised further into the High Frequency Trading, and colocated their computers in the same racks as the ASX computers, it just got much worse. The front-running of trades, and especially closing prices, by the HFT computers can be seen every day here.

Add to that the problem of Dark Pools, where trades are carried out off market, and non-transparently (should that be opaquely?), and you then get the situation where shorts can cover off market, so the long-suffering individual traders don't see the good old fashioned short-covering rallies.

The problem for me is that having previously been a TA type, I am now completely disillusioned with TA. Virtually all of technical analysis is based on the assumption that the numbers represent the sentiment of the markets. But now, there is NO sentiment. Trades are carried out by the bots, no sentiment required, and it is perpetrated in such a way that large numbers of shares can change hands without moving the market price of those shares. Also, shorters can now walk the price down deliberately, while sellers (as opposed to shorters) can hold the price up. It's all down to what the bots are programmed to do.

I have a friend who works for one of Australia's leading trading banks, and I've been into their trading room. In the morning, they just select the stocks they are going to play with for the day, and decide what closing price they want for the end of the day, enter the parameters into their bot programs, then just let the bots do their thing all day. It is sickening to watch - just milking money out of the markets every day.