Automated trader conducted their annual reader survey, and published the results of their findings. Collated by Bob Giffords, there were some key take-aways that I found interesting. Firstly, we have to remember that subscribing to Automated Trader is quite expensive, and so only people with an interest in automated trading are likely to participate in the survey. Perhaps a self selecting sample.
Anyway, the survey highlighted an increase in end-to-end automation, with (for me) a surprising number of buy side organizations (35%) that tied 100% of machine generated signals into orders with no human supervision (only 10-15% of sell side organizations are equally robotic. It would be tempting to point to HFT as the cause of this, however more than 60% of the buy side respondents were executing at an average rate of less than second (over 45% were at less than one order per minute). The buy-side were (not unexpectedly) also less interested in being the fastest in the market – with less than 40% indicating that latency was important to their trading. The similar figure for the sell side was about 60%.
I’ve really only scratched the surface of this results from this report – I strongly recommend perusing it if you have access.
