Richard Ketchum, the Street’s top cop, is taking on high-frequency trading — and the “dark pools” where it operates — with a probe, sources tell The Post.
Ketchum, who runs the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), has vowed to illuminate the 50 or so dark pools and their computerized trading.
Black boxes are trading so fast (and in the process shooting up volume) that critics say it’s hard to tell what’s legitimate trading any longer.
Finra is examining activity such as “wash trades” — in effect, phantom volume. This past week the electronic BATS Global Markets revealed how a computer had botched 440,000 transactions at a cost of $420,361 to investors over several years.