April 17, 2010
I am a short term trader as well as a long term investor. Reading some of these comments I felt compelled to comment myself. I think that co location could in fact hurt a long term investor like myself significantly. If I place an order to purchase a stock and while my order is in route to the exchange, a co located trader sees my order and sends their own order out ahead of mine and drives the price higher and so I am forced to pay more. If I am buying a less liquid stock and I am buying a fair amount, this co located trader may force me to pay up one, two, three percent or more who knows. Now say that I paid up one percent. Take that one percent I paid up and 20 years later when I go to cash out my stock (hopefully at a nice gain), how much have I lost had that one percent that was stolen from me (because a co located trader was able to step in front of my order and then sell the stock I was trying to buy back to me at a premium) been invested with compounding interest? I can buy pretty fast computer that doesnt make a difference. I cant pay to be co located. I read on some previous post that co location is affordable. Is co location affordable like a high speed internet connection is affordable? If not then its not accessible enough for most investors. Should I have to use a broker dealer who is playing their game and paying be co located if I want to buy and sell stock and not be at a clear disadvantage? Isnt that the same stacking of the deck that nobody is pleased with and the reason this board is open for comment? Lets go a step further lets sell co located space in tiers since we are allowed to sell it at all. Room A is the VIP access, If you pay for Room A today the only thing that separates your computer from the server is a few inches of a cooling fan. Room A is quite expensive though, so if your not a nine figure kind of trader or broker dealer you may be more suited to Room B. Welcome to Room B. Room B is for those 8 figure traders and broker dealers. By the time you get to me and your average investors we are in Room S for sucker. All of these tiers can see and react to lower tier incoming orders and take the most profitable action which results in the most loss for me. They say they arent selling tiers yet but they will. As far as buying a fast computer and a faster connection and its within everyone's reach, Is this a race? Is this financial Nascar? I think all this started when we went to decimals. I say lets go back to fractions. Why did we go to decimals to start with? It was probably one of those big money places who foreseen this type of edge and lobbied hard for the change under different pretenses. Either way I say ban sub pennies, ban flash trading, ban dark pools unless they are for LARGE BLOCK institutional orders and go back to decimals. Thank you for taking our comments.