High-Frequency Front Running

High-Frequency Front Running. Veteran subscribers are very familiar with the debate concerning high-frequency trading (HFT) because Fuller-Treacy Money has been posting articles on the subject and writing about it throughout the last five years, as the historic Archive will confirm. Michael Lewis and others who have expressed criticisms of HFT today are rightly focussing on the fact that it is mainly a front-running system. Therefore the 'T' in HFT is actually a misnomer because the normal definition of trading does not include front-running, which is supposed to be illegal. Moreover, normal trading has always carried a level of risk because the future is generally unknown. Today's HFT would be more accurately described as HFFR, for high-frequency front running. HFFR virtually eliminates risk because it gets a clear look at the immediate future by seeing everyone else's buy and sell orders, microseconds before they are excuted.