Gone in 22 seconds

Posted by Al Lewis on February 25, 2012
Wall Street

Some day investors will measure the duration of their investments by the tenths or even hundredths of a second.

The high-frequency trading that dominates markets these days has pushed the average holding time of a stock to unimaginably short  durations, already.

Securities and Exchange Commission chairwoman Mary Schapiro says she’s worried about the influence high-frequency trading has on markets.

If an investor is only holding a stock for minutes or seconds at a time, who has time to care what a company does?

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal.