(NEW YORK POST) The FBI has joined state and regulatory probes of high-frequency traders to see if the firms are guilty of insider trading.
Agents, who started the probe about a year ago, are looking to see if the HFTs used information to trade ahead of large institutional orders, an FBI spokesman told a number of media outlets on Monday when news of the investigation first surfaced.
In one possible scenario, agents would look to see if a high-speed trading firm profited by jumping ahead of a huge buy order, and then quickly exited after the giant order pushed the stock higher.
