It was an honor to sit on the CFTC Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) last week. The CFTC is the US regulator for derivatives trading – which is a big area. The topic of the first meeting of the TAC was to understand Algorithmic and High Frequency Trading – and its impact on the market. The CFTC is sensibly trying to understand where they should regulate and where they should propose best practices. Obviously the memory of the "flash crash" is still fresh in everyone's mind. One of the topics of interest was that of pirate algorithms that attack other algorithms and try to manipulate the market. I’ve just written a blog posting on it if you’d like to read more: