James Angel, associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, says algorithmic trading was not to blame for the wild market shifts last week, and may have actually helped stabilize trading.

“Whenever something happens in the market, it’s tempting to blame the people who trade the most and those are the high-frequency traders,” Angel tells Reuters Insider. However, if you look, we learned a lot about them after the flash crash studies, and we discovered that most of them trade in fairly small amounts and yes, they do trade frequently, but generally they don’t like to hold overnight positions. And they generally don’t take huge positions one way or the other.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Reuters Insider video, Trading, high-frequency trading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.