HFTViz: Visualization for the exploration of high frequency trading data

High Frequency Trading (HFT), mainly based on high speed infrastructure, is a significant element of the trading industry. However, trading machines generate enormous quantities of trading messages that are difficult to explore for financial researchers and traders. Visualization tools of financial data usually focus on portfolio management and the analysis of the relationships between risk and return. Beside risk-return relationship, there are other aspects that attract financial researchers like liquidity and moments of flash crashes in the market. HFT researchers can extract these aspects from HFT data since it shows every detail of the market movement. In this paper, we present HFTViz, a visualization tool designed to help financial researchers explore the HFT dataset provided by NASDAQ exchange. HFTViz provides a comprehensive dashboard aimed at facilitate HFT data exploration. HFTViz contains two sections. It first proposes an overview of the market on a specific date. After selecting desired stocks from overview visualization to investigate in detail, HFTViz also provides a detailed view of the trading messages, the trading volumes and the liquidity measures. In a case study gathering five domain experts, we illustrate the usefulness of HFTViz.

The adaptive market hypothesis and high frequency trading

This paper uses NASDAQ order book data for the S&P 500 exchange traded fund (SPY) to examine the relationship between one-minute, informational market efficiency and high frequency trading (HFT). We find that the level of efficiency varies widely over time and appears to cluster. Periods of high efficiency are followed by periods of low efficiency and vice versa. Further, we find that HFT activity is higher during periods of low efficiency. This supports the argument that HFTs seek profits and risk reduction by actively processing information, through limit order additions and cancellations, during periods of lower efficiency and revert to more passive market-making and rebate-generation during periods of higher efficiency. These findings support the argument that the adaptive market hypothesis (AMH) is an appropriate description of how prices evolve to incorporate information.

Quantifying the High-Frequency Trading “Arms Race”

We use stock exchange message data to quantify the negative aspect of high-frequency trading, known as “latency arbitrage.” The key difference between message data and widely familiar limit order book data is that message data contain attempts to trade or cancel that fail. This allows the researcher to observe both winners and losers in a race, whereas in limit order book data you cannot see the losers, so you cannot directly see the races. We find that latency arbitrage races are very frequent (about one per minute per symbol for FTSE 100 stocks), extremely fast (the modal race lasts 5–10 millionths of a second), and account for a remarkably large portion of overall trading volume (about 20%). Race participation is concentrated, with the top six firms accounting for over 80% of all race wins and losses. The average race is worth just a small amount (about half a price tick), but because of the large volumes the stakes add up. Our main estimates suggest that races constitute roughly one-third of price impact and the effective spread (key microstructure measures of the cost of liquidity), that latency arbitrage imposes a roughly 0.5 basis point tax on trading, that market designs that eliminate latency arbitrage would reduce the market’s cost of liquidity by 17%, and that the total sums at stake are on the order of $5 billion per year in global equity markets alone.