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Comment by chrisaycock | Hacker News Reader

This article is very poorly researched. For example, it refers to high-frequency traders as "flash traders". I have never heard that term before. The cited Wikipedia article discusses flash orders, which was a quoting mechanism that DirectEdge experimented with in 2009. Flash orders are not some most automated market markers even care about.

Also, the article mentions Harold Bradley as "among the first traders to explore the power of algorithms in the late '90s", completely omitting much earlier pioneers such as Peter Muller and David E. Shaw.

And of course it goes into depth about the Flash Crash without once mentioning Waddell & Reed, a discretionary (non-quant) fund whose errant trade started the crash to begin with.

Reading this was like watching the 11-o'clock news discuss a medical discovery.

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Everything else you said was spot on, but this is wrong:

> And of course it goes into depth about the Flash Crash without once mentioning Waddell & Reed, a discretionary (non-quant) fund whose errant trade started the crash to begin with.

Waddell & Reed had nothing to do with the big flash crash, nor with the 10 slightly smaller crashes that has happened since -- at least, not any other non-HFT trader had that day. If you want something which isn't some ridiculous CYA, read Nanex's analysis, not the SEC.

Nothing unusual then. Pretty much every tech article in the WSJ is of this caliber.

Except that I see no indication this is a Wall Street Journal article. The site is Ars Technica; the by-line says "By Felix Salmon (wired.com), Jon Stokes" and the end of the article says "Felix Salmon (felix@felix salmon.com) is a blogger for Reuters."

I think what @w1ntermute means is that we can expect Ars to screw-up finance stories just as the WSJ screws up tech stories. Kind of an admonition for when journalists choose to venture beyond their expertise.

Yeah, sorry I didn't make that clearer. I made the comment while this[0] poorly researched/written WSJ tech article was still on my mind.

0: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2086738

That's odd; Felix Salmon writes almost exclusively for the financial industry, and used to run his own blog. Reuters hired him for his finance industry audience. It's surprising that he would make elementary errors regarding his industry of primary coverage.

It's easy to be wrong when it's so hard to make out what's right. Algorithmic traders are unusually secretive about their modes of operation. The primary knowledge dissemination mechanism is via employees moving.

Uh, but the Wikipedia article on the topic has the relevant information in this case.

which was a quoting mechanism that DirectEdge experimented with in 2009

Could you go into more detail about what you mean by that? Unless you're being pedantic about something specific, I don't get how you could say that. Flash trading (in several variations) is basically the only thing Direct Edge offers, and they currently carry roughly 12% of the market's daily trading volume.

>Also, the article mentions Harold Bradley as "among the first traders to explore the power of algorithms in the late '90s", completely omitting much earlier pioneers such as Peter Muller and David E. Shaw

Don't forget the super pioneering work that Claude Shannon and Ed Thorp were doing way back in the 60's and 70's too!

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