alt Hacker News> Perhaps Texas could use a different trading model that doesn't require ultra high speed trading.
What would that look like? Periodic auctions? Certainly it could be done, I'm just trying to understand what problem might be solved, and whether the solution would be effective.
For example, even with the opening and closing auctions we have today, there can be an advantage to getting your order accepted right before the deadline. Some participants do this, most don't really (depending on the exact definition of "right before"). But the fact that some do tells me that some participants would do the same thing with periodic auctions, and at least for them latency would still be important.
If, as seems likely, latency is fundamentally important to at least some styles of trading, how do you incentivize participants to not value it?
Replies
You could force companies to provide standing orders to sell unlimited shares at a price selected when they go public, and one they're unlikely to go below.
This would happily also eliminate price speculation entirely. The price would just be whatever the price is and most returns would come from dividends. Would require a bunch of tax and regulatory changes
Eric Ries first started talking about a Long-Term Stock Exchange, he suggested long (potentially multi-year) lock-up periods. The LTSE he actually implemented doesn't have that. I speculate that this was a compromised because they are allowing dual listings which helps them gain market share but also would undermine the entire concept of very long lock-ups.
I'd love to see a stock market actually do this.
One option is to add a random delay to every trade, thus making high speed arbitrage substantially more difficult.
You take bids continuously but publish the bids and "resolve" the auction every X seconds, where X is between 5 and 10. Then there is no speed advantage as long as you can get your bid in within 5 seconds.