Toronto-based Aequitas Innovations Inc. hopes to build awareness about the dangers of high frequency trading through a new YouTube video.
“There are still a lot of stakeholders in the market [including financial advisors] that don’t fully understand what’s going on,” says Jos Schmitt, president and CEO of Aequitas, the parent company of Aequitas Neo Exchange. “And what a video like this is doing is bringing it to the forefront and pushing people to ask more questions.”
The video, Price Change: Are Predatory High Frequency Traders taking advantage of you?, depicts shoppers at a grocery store selecting bananas when the price suddenly jumps from 69 cents per pound to $4.49 per pound.
Some questions Schmitt hopes advisors will start asking about high frequency trading: how are my clients affected by high frequency trading? How are my orders and trade instructions handled? Does my dealer protect me from high frequency trading strategies?
Aequitas plans to launch more videos in future highlighting other problems the organization sees in today’s markets, including liquidity and transparency issues.
“What better way to open up the debate [and have a discussion] than with a simple assessment of what the issue is,” says Schmitt. “I think that can help us take the markets to a better place than where they are today.”