The financial commodities broker believes high frequency trading in metals could account for 20 percent of volume on the London Metal Exchange in just a few years, according to Bloomberg.
In an interview in London earlier this week Marex Spectron’s global head of electronic trading John Lowry, formerly of both Lehman Brothers and Chi-X Global, indicated that the company expects HFT to play in increasingly large part in metals markets. While it currently makes up less than five percent of the volumes on the London Metal Index, that amount is higher on New York’s Comex.
“It’s a very small market, but it will grow,” said Lowry, pointing to the rapid growth in high frequency trading in stocks. HFT now accounts for around 60 percent of volume on the stock market, up from less than 10 percent at the beginning of the last decade.
Marex Spectron is the world’s biggest privately owned broker of financial products in the commodities sector and a major provider of services to high frequency traders.