<i>frontrunning (n): the practice by market makers of dealing on advance information provided by their brokers and investment analysts, before their clients have been given the information</i><p>The prototypical example is a large investment bank hearing about a large client buy order, then putting in a buy order first on their own book, knowing it will go up due to the client order. It is a violation of your fiduciary duty to the client.
Since we're close to the topic, let's take a moment to all remember that Flash Boys is a crappy book that gets a lot of stuff really really wrong.<p>Read the rebuttal!<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-Frequency-ebook/dp/B00P0QI2M2" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-...</a>
I'm worried about articles like this are because people want to try to regulate crypto currencies. I really like the idea of crypto being the wild west. If you use a cheap/crappy broker or exchange you're going to get a worse price than if you use a good (expensive?) one. Deal with it. If you want to deal with a heavily regulated currency use EUR/USD/JPY etc.
Note: they can really only "frontrun" you if you are making a <i>massive</i> trade. Even then, from the other side it's not really perceived as frontrunning, rather as "getting out of the way" of a huge order that's going to change the price. You don't want to be the one that sold them some stock for $1 that they will immediately push to $10, which then you will have to buy back for $10, as you are the market maker...
Coincidentally, there is a paper and talk about this called:<p>Flash Boys 2.0: Frontrunning, Transaction Reordering, and Consensus Instability in Decentralized Exchanges<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234v1" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05234v1</a>
<a href="https://www.cbspringconference.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbspringconference.org/</a>
Non issue. Of course. Just put in a limit order and be done with it. If you are really scrapping pennies in front of steam rollers you should find another gig because algos will eat you up.
Any reference to flash boys is commonly an article looking for click bait. If you look at modern HFT, most of the profits have been eaten away among the competition, its no longer some hugely profitable industry. It is contracting. Sure a few firms are making millions, but its really not a big deal. Its really getting tired, most people love to get all up in arms about this, at this point high speed trading is run of the mill.<p>The same will happen to cryptos. There is always early profitability because theres no competition, but the profitability will erode.
I am not as familiar with the crypto trading industry but I did work in equity markets for a number of years and for a while on short term, high volume strategies. I still have a hard time trusting any article that uses Flash Boys. I still find that book to be one of the worst representations of the electronic markets. It paints this evil picture similar to a chemtrails kind of conspiracy where a single entity is causing harm. In reality it is a complex organism where each entity is try to gain an advantage.<p>Since a lot of comments are talking about the equity markets I figured I would add my thoughts.<p>There is definitely a need for regulation. No we don't need to get rid of electronic trading, frontrunners or algs but we do need to pay attention to whats happening. I remember that window of time where the NASDAQ was selling order information subseconds before it happened. This is bad. Or the exchange (forgot which one) that was creating special order types for just big clients that were unpublished, this is also illegal and was stopped.<p>I love frontrunning. People seem to forget the era pre computer market making where there was a guy that made the market for a specific stock. Or how slowly information traveled. People on the floor would know the moment something happened and be able to trade on it right away compared to everyone else. We had dollar size spreads. Today we have penny or even sub-penny level spreads. Sure someone is making money off of me when I make a tread, but their margin is A LOT less than what it once was. Is someone manipulating my order...probably not, I am too small of a fry. Is someone manipulating Vanguards orders, people are probably trying but I suspect based on literature that firms like Vanguard have put out...they overall like it, cost of trades are drastically lower than historically.<p>TLDR if someone has a way to trade across markets faster than the rest...thats great, they are serving a useful job in making prices across markets even and if they are doing it well they are earning their money for the risk and cost associated with it.<p>Edit: I highly recommend the book Dark Pools. Its a much more unbiased book about electronic markets and how they came to be. I feel that it paints a much more realistic picture compared to Lewis' hype.
Am I wrong, but don't all the crypto "whales" know each other, and can't they synchronize buying and selling? Essentially their bots all start buying together, wait for retail and other bots to join the uptick and then again all sell at the same time. Profit. Repeat.
How is this any different from algo trading on the stock market?<p>I read or watched somewhere where the algo traders would skim a tiny percentage of every transaction of mutual funds because they know exactly when to strike.<p>There are lots of sharks in the muddy water...
Financial system setup by those ideologically opposed to current regulatory regime suffers from the same problems the current regulatory regime was designed to mitigate. Report at 11.
Where are the people that told me that front-running is only used to describe your actions in response to your own client's orders?<p>Just because you were taught not to use it in email doesn't mean that certain forms of arbitrage are not front running.
Anyone who is a serious participant in the crypto markets knows they are nothing but a pure Wild West free for all. That is, like all other markets except without the pretense of regulations that purportedly protect the little guy. (But usually achieve the opposite.)