Business

Once a critic of high-frequency traders, now he works for them

That was fast, even for high-frequency trading.

Bart Chilton, once a government regulator and prominent critic of the nearly speed-of-light HFT crowd, is now advising industry boosters that deny they rig the markets.

Chilton, now a senior policy adviser at law firm DLA Piper, will advise Modern Markets Initiative, an HFT advocacy group, “on regulatory and public policy matters,” the group said.

HFT firms are accused of bilking ordinary investors by using high-speed systems to jump ahead of buy orders to snap up targeted shares — thus bidding up prices.

This month, Brad Katsuyama, CEO of anti-HFT trading platform IEX — and hero of the Michael Lewis book, “Flash Boys” — accused Chilton in a Bloomberg op-ed of lying about the volume of high-frequency trading on his platform.

“Nothing we have seen surprises us,” Katsuyama told The Post. “People respond to incentives — and the bigger the incentive the more aggressively they respond.”

Chilton, formerly a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, didn’t return a voicemail seeking comment.