Chinese E-commerce Juggernaut Alibaba Set to Boost IPO Price Despite High-frequency Trading Concerns

Edgar Perez, former McKinsey and IBM consultant, is a global expert, author of The Speed Traders, Knightmare on Wall Street, and the course director of The Speed Traders Workshop 2014 Singapore, “How Banks, Hedge and Mutual Funds and Brokers Battle Markets ‘RIGGED’ by Wall Street’s ‘Flash Boys’, High-frequency Trading, Exchanges and Dark Pools”.

New York, NY, USA (September 16, 2014) — China’s biggest e-commerce company plans to increase the top end of a marketed price range to just below $70, from $66 previously. According to Reuters, Alibaba worried about Nasdaq’s ability to handle their $21 billion IPO, since the exchange botched Facebook’s market debut two years ago. Nasdaq tried to persuade Alibaba that it had fixed the problem but it is not clear whether they were swayed. One source said that Alibaba eventually was satisfied that Nasdaq had solved the issue and chose NYSE because its overall pitch was better. Another said Nasdaq executives believed that Alibaba decided that the possibility of a botched IPO, however small, outweighed the possible benefits of being in the index.

Nasdaq systems buckled under the tremendous volume of orders on the first day of trading in Facebook’s shares in 2012, leading to hours of delay. In its current presentation to Alibaba, Nasdaq detailed the steps it had taken to prevent another Facebook-style glitch said. The exchange has said it responded to Facebook by putting extra safeguards in place, creating new positions within the company to improve communications with the industry and regulators when errors occur, and establishing an engineering team to monitor and analyze daily performance.

At the end, Alibaba chose NYSE; according to Mr. Edgar Perez, course director of The Speed Traders Workshop 2014 Singapore, “How Banks, Hedge and Mutual Funds and Brokers Battle Markets ‘RIGGED’ by Wall Street’s ‘Flash Boys’, High-frequency Trading, Exchanges and Dark Pools”, that is the reason why Alibaba shouldn’t worry about high-frequency trading, as NYSE systems have demonstrated time-tested resilience in the IPO process.

The Speed Traders Workshop 2014 Singapore (http://www.thespeedtradersworkshop.com), covers the latest research currently available and reveals how high-frequency trading players are operating in global markets and driving the development of electronic trading at breakneck speeds from the U.S. and Europe to Japan, India, and Brazil. The “flash crash”, the suspended BATS IPO, the botched Facebook IPO, Knight Capital’s trading malfunction and Nasdaq’s Flash Freeze are just a few of the milestones in the history of high-frequency trading that will be dissected with participants.

Knightmare on Wall Street, the fascinating story of Knight Capital put together by course director Edgar Perez, was the most favorably reviewed Kindle edition book on Amazon in 2013, with an average rating of 5 out of five stars. Knight Capital, founded by Kenneth Pasternak and Walter Raquet in 1995, had seen its fortunes change as U.S. regulators made a series of changes in the structure of financial markets and computers were progressively expanding their share of trading. The Flash Crash, the infamous 1,000 point drop of the DJIA on May 6, 2010 (the largest one-day point decline in history), illustrated how market structure problems could almost instantaneously cascade from one market participant to the rest.

Mr. Perez is widely regarded as the preeminent global expert and speaker in the specialized areas of algorithmic and high-frequency trading. He is also author of The Speed Traders, An Insider’s Look at the New High-Frequency Trading Phenomenon That is Transforming the Investing World, published in English, Chinese and Bahasa Indonesia. He contributes to The New York Times, UltraHighFrequencyTrading.com and China’s International Finance News and Sina Finance.

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