In 1968, traders on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) faced a rather sizable problem. For the first time ever, the market experienced a daily trading volume of over twenty million shares. Unfortunately, each of the twenty million shares came in paper form, which meant that in order to complete a trade a broker needed to transport and deliver a physical stock certificate, along with an average of thirty-three paper forms, from one party to another.
In this Article, I explore many of the problems associated with high frequency trading (HFT), and introduce a framework that can be used to solve these problems.