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Supreme Court Denies Exchanges' Request to Hear HFT Case
Traders Magazine Online News, October 15, 2018
Forget newly installed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s more important news from the highest court in the land.
According to S&P Market Intelligence, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a request from the largest U.S. stock exchanges to hear a case over whether they systematically favor high-frequency traders.
As a refresh, back in 2014 a group of pension and retirement funds along with the city of Providence, R.I., filing a case against exchange operators Intercontinental Exchange Inc., Nasdaq Inc. and Cboe Global Markets Inc. sell and offer products that illegally favor Wall Street's fastest traders over larger, slower-moving institutional investors.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed a 2015 dismissal of the case, the exchanges asked the Supreme Court to review the decision and possibly hear the case. The exchanges asked the court to explore the validity of the Second Circuit's finding that a party, such as the exchanges, can be held liable if their products or services were sold or used in a fraud, even if another market participant led that scheme independently.
The action not to hear the case was expected.
So, what does this mean?
S&P noted that the legal battle between the exchanges and the plaintiffs will continue in the federal district court, where it was sent in 2017 after the Second Circuit's decision. The district court has not yet decided the case.
The plaintiffs argue that the complexity and prices of those products help facilitate a market structure that benefits high-frequency traders over other investors. But the exchanges say the plaintiffs have failed to show that anyone has been harmed by the alleged high-frequency trading manipulation, let alone the plaintiffs themselves.
"Having simply alleged that they bought and sold unidentified stock, it is equally plausible that, even assuming any stocks were manipulated by [high-frequency traders], plaintiffs were not injured at all or perhaps even benefited from the alleged manipulation," the exchanges wrote in a renewed motion to dismiss the district court case filed in May.
Spokespeople for the three exchanges declined to comment on the Supreme Court's decision.
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