Flash Boys and Cassandras; Debates on the Regulation of High Frequency Trading Are Revived

In the last twenty years the stock market began a significant shift as a combination of new technology and regulations led to the emergence of high frequency trading (HFT). Through the use of complex algorithms and high-speed internet connections, traders can buy and sell in fractions of seconds, potentially making an exceptionally high number of small profits, sufficiently fast so as to result in significant overall gains. These algorithmic trading systems require little or no human involvement and rely on computerised quantitative models to execute thousands of orders per second. The advances in trading technologies which have facilitated the rise of HFT have also accelerated the speed at which shocks can travel through the financial system at a pace that far outstrips the capacity of regulatory reaction