Business Wire ends feed to high speed traders
Trading moves at super-fast speeds that once were unimaginable.
For some investors, it's the milliseconds that count.
A service criticized for giving big investment houses an unfair lead on market-moving news will no longer be available to so-called high frequency traders.
Business Wire, which is owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway , rejects claims it gives certain clients an unfair advantage. But late Thursday it said it would no longer sell a direct feed that pumps such news into some companies' systems.
Instead, high-frequency traders will have to use the same sources as everyone else to get company press releases and earnings: company websites, email inboxes, financial news providers and business news sites, such as CNNMoney.
If this seems like insider baseball, it is. But high-speed trading runs at photo-finish speeds, and many decisions to buy or sell are computerized.
High-frequency traders 'erode confidence in our markets and skim from the rest of the investing public, which hurts the entire market,' New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement praising the decision. Under his pressure, Thomson Reuters decided last year to stop selling certain economic data to elite traders two seconds before the public saw it.
Related: The computers that run the stock market
Business Wire said it was acting now because of a recent Wall Street Journal article that suggested $800,000 in trades were conducted 50 milliseconds after Business Wire moved an earnings statement. Rival services published the news fractions of a second later.
Market rules require material information to be distributed to Wall Street and the public at the same time.
Business Wire CEO Cathy Baron Tamraz said in a statement 'there was nothing wrong' with its service, which follows Regulation Fair Disclosure.
'However, in discussions that have taken place with a few of our clients, we learned that the article may have caused some misperceptions, and that was of deep concern to us,' the company said. 
First Published: February 21, 2014: 6:08 AM ET
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