Abstract
Automated high-frequency trading has grown tremendously in the past 20 years and is responsible for about half of all trading activities at stock exchanges worldwide. Geography is central to the rise of high-frequency trading due to a market design of “continuous trading” that allows traders to engage in arbitrage based upon informational advantages built into the socio-technical assemblages that make up current capital markets. Enormous investments have been made in creating transmission technologies and optimizing computer architectures, all in an effort to shave milliseconds of order travel time (or latency) within and between markets. We show that as a result of the built spatial configuration of capital markets, “public” is no longer synonymous with “equal” information. High-frequency trading increases information inequalities between market participants.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 121-140 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Environment and Planning A |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 1 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.
Keywords
- Geography of finance
- high-frequency trading
- information inequality
- location of financial trading
- socializing markets
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Environmental Science (miscellaneous)
