Asness Comes To The Defense Of HFT Yet Again

Founder and principal manager of AQR Capital Management Cliff Asness has been a vocal supporter of high frequency trading (HFT) since it first started receiving widespread attention a few months ago, and he is back a new editorial on Real Clear Markets (co-written by his colleagues Aaron Brown, Michael Mendelson, and Hitesh Mittal) defending HFT. “The debate has not calmed or moved on to more constructive discussions of market microstructure as we suggested. While a number of large asset managers have now made statements supporting HFT, new charges against HFT continue to gain prominence,” he writes. ‘Front-running’ is just order…