Matt Levine sheds more light on this story[1], backed by evidence whereas the NYTimes is just hearsay. Why would Barclay's screw over institutional investors who account for a large majority of their $4 billion in revenue for HFT who bring in only $3 million? Because without HFT (which is a bad, bad word to the ATG's ears), nobody would be trading on it, and nobody wants to admit that. It just doesn't make sense.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-26/barclays-not-smart" rel="nofollow">http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-06-26/barclays-no...</a>
It's ironic that the "dark" in "dark pool" is now being interpreted in a negative manner, synonomous with "opaque".<p>The reason such pools are dark is to reduce the market impact of large orders. If an institutional investor (e.g. a pension fund) were to announce to the world "We are going to sell a shitload of Apple shares tomorrow!", the Apple share price would fall, as everyone front-ran the trade. That would result in a lower price for the pension fund when it actually got around to selling its shares. Regulators actually recognise the advantages in reducing market impact and they specifically allow delays in reporting large, off-exchange trades between clients and broker-dealers to the market for that reason.<p>Dark pools were conceived of as a mechanism to allow institutional investors to trade off-exchange (in theory, with one another), so that they didn't have to post bid orders publicly on the "lit" exchange. The reason they're called "dark pools" is because you can't see the order book, so you don't get to see big orders being added to the book (and take advantage of the knowledge that someone's just placed a big order, to front-run them). In other words, you don't know how deep the pool (i.e. the liquidity on the order book) is - just like you can't see how deep a dark pool of water is.<p>As someone who works in financial markets, it's weirdly fascinating to watch terms like "dark pools" and HFT end up being used as epithets, almost, by the media.<p>It's a bit like how the word "hacker" came to be regarded by many as describing a computer criminal.
Another take on the story from someone who has worked both the buy side and the sell side:<p><a href="http://kiddynamitesworld.com/hear-g-schneiderman-going-barclays-dark-pool/" rel="nofollow">http://kiddynamitesworld.com/hear-g-schneiderman-going-barcl...</a>
Strangely enough, I had never heard of a "darkpool" until today. I bought <i>Flash Boys</i> at the airport bookstore earlier, and read it on the plane just now. And tonight I find a reference to darkpools on the HN front-page. Hmmm. Truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes.<p>Anyway, FWIW, if anybody here hasn't read <i>Flash Boys</i> by Michael Lewis, it's a pretty interesting read that covers some ground related to the content of this article: HFT, dark-pools, etc. I understand that it's not without some controversy, but I found it damn interesting all the same.
You can't trust people. Even supposedly-trustworthy people working for supposedly-trustworthy household-name financial institutions like Barclays. What then can we trust? Technologies like BitCoin are predecated on the idea that we can trust mathematics and peer-reviewed logic. Are these mechanisms inherently more trustworthy than individual humans and human institutions? If this is truly the case, then the argument for financial intermediation to be founded on a similar technological basis is an exceptionally strong one. Anybody else interested in following this rabbit hole to see where it leads?
Micheal Lewis explains dark pools and HFT's quite well in his new book Flash Boys [1].<p>[1] <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393244660" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/03932...</a>