The surge in volume on the anti-HFT equity trading platform IEX [7] - of Flash Boys and TV-fight-night fame - makes it very easy to see how the buy-side (which the US retail investor is one small part of) clearly prefers an un-rigged place to find willing sellers (or buyers). Relatively light regulation and high volumes make the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market a prime target for high-frequency traders. More than 35% of spot currency volume in October was by speed traders, up from 9% five years earlier, but just as in equity markets, there are speculators and there are natural buyers and sellers in FX markets (looking to hedge payments and receipts from real business for example). As Bloomberg reports [8], a currency-dealing platform known as ParFX, established in 2011, offers a transparent marketplace and subjects orders to random pauses of about 20 to 80 milliseconds, and "is the industry’s effort to heal itself."
IEX volumes hit record highs...
[9]
And now the FX markets - also dominated by High-Frequency-Trading - have an anti-HFT platform upon which to transact...
The FX market is just as plagued by the HFT "parasite" as equity markets...
Relatively light regulation and high volumes make the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign-exchange market a prime target for high-frequency traders. More than 35 percent of spot currency volume in October was by speed traders, up from 9 percent five years earlier, according to Boston-based consultancy Aite Group LLC.
...
“There’s been a lot of dissatisfaction, particularly on the buy-side and asset-management community, about high-frequency trading,” said Richard Bentley, the vice president for financial services at Software AG, which aggregates trading platforms including ParFX. “There’s the perception that they’re parasites. What ParFX have done is essentially play to that and said, come and trade in our pool, because we’re not going to allow the HFT people to come and spoil the fun.”
And ParFX was set up specifically to rmeove HFT's ability to front-run orders (just like IEX did in equity markets)...
A currency-dealing platform known as ParFX, established in 2011 by firms from Deutsche Bank AG to Citigroup Inc...
The system started trading in July, and now executes deals for 15 firms including Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Barclays Plc and UBS AG, the four biggest currency dealers. It expects to have 25 percent more clients by the end of April.
ParFX offers a transparent marketplace and subjects orders to random pauses of about 20 to 80 milliseconds, and “is the industry’s effort to heal itself,” according to Marcus.
The bottom line is a search for "trust" is on the rise...
“These banks do need to trade foreign exchange because it’s their business and they’re hedging their currency exposure across the world,” London-based Marcus said in an April 15 interview. “They would rather trade in an environment that they can trust.”