Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) Chairman and President Terry Duffy spoke with FOX Business Network’s (FBN) Liz Claman about his thoughts on the market reaction yesterday regarding the fake Associated Press (AP) tweet. Duffy said, that the CME did not change or cancel any trades yesterday due to the hoax. When asked about the danger to the market of high frequency traders Duffy said, “the whole market is not high frequency, so if they see a blip in the market and they all go one direction there’s people buying that activity, or there’s people selling that activity.”
On whether the CME canceled trading yesterday due to the Twitter hoax:
“No, not at all. We coordinated with stock exchanges around the world on percentages, so you know what the percentages are 7%, 13%, 20% intraday on those. This was a small percentage down.”
On the danger of high frequency trading to the markets:
“I don’t know if it takes down our markets. I am not convinced that’s the case. Because when you look at our market structure there are participants that are in the market looking for directional trades, everybody is not a high frequency trader. The whole market is not high frequency, so if they see a blip in the market and they all go one direction there’s people buying that activity, or there’s people selling that activity, so the people that stood in the market yesterday because they wanted to have exposure to a market place and not pay attention to that tweet actually did quite well.”
