For the past month, high-frequency trading has been under attack. The first volley came on a Sunday night in late March, when author Michael Lewis, introducing his new book Flash Boys on the news magazine program 60 Minutes, delivered the most perfectly succinct of all headline-grabbing comments. “The markets are rigged,” he told correspondent Steve Kroft, implying that high-frequency traders front-run the market and are cheating ordinary investors.
Since then, the imagery used to battle HFT has only grown more fanciful and over the top. Charles Schwab, founder of the brokerage firm that bears his name, called high-frequency traders a “cancer,” and Jim Kramer told his CNBC audience that “defending high-frequency trading is no different than defending the mosquito.”
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