High Frequency Trading as An Operad

1. Check out Nanex's research on high frequency trading (HFT) "flash crashes", here:http://www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/FlashCrashAnalysis.html

2. They argue that HFT makes a nonsense of the regulatory principle that exchanges should offer the best possible price--the National Best Bid and Offer price. Price discovery in the algo-electronics trades is simply simultaneous execution across many pools. It's more "price dictation" than any form of "discovery", more direct manipulation than any sort of market risk. See especially the HFT simulation embedded here: http://www.nanex.net/Research/IsNBBOIgnored.html

3. HFT is basically an operad, which means there is a multicategory (that is, a finite but higher dimensional input) with one result.