Tower Research Capital LLC, or simply Tower Research, is a

high-frequency trading High-frequency trading (HFT) is a type of algorithmic financial trading characterized by high speeds, high turnover rates, and high order-to-trade ratios that leverages high-frequency financial data and electronic trading tools. While there is no ...

algorithmic trading Algorithmic trading is a method of executing orders using automated pre-programmed trading instructions accounting for variables such as time, price, and volume. This type of trading attempts to leverage the speed and computational resources of ...

, and

financial services Financial services are the economic services provided by the finance industry, which encompasses a broad range of businesses that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, accountancy companies, ...

fund.

About Tower

Tower Research Capital is one of the oldest automated trading firms. It was started by

Mark Gorton Mark Howard Gorton (born November 7, 1966) is the creator of LimeWire, a peer-to-peer file sharing client for the Java Platform, and chief executive of the Lime Group. Lime Group, based in New York, owns LimeWire as well as Lime Brokerage LLC (a ...

and Alistair Brown in February 1998. Tower's internal trading teams are independent from one another, enjoying autonomy while accessing shared technology resources such as hardware, software, and connectivity as well as resources such as business management, legal, compliance, and risk management. At the heart of operations is the core engineering team, which owns the architecture, implementation and optimization of the trading platform itself. This includes developing systems and tools to access market data, perform trend analysis, run trading simulations, order entry and management, real-time trade support, risk management and post-trade services. Working together, Tower builds technology and deploys diverse automated and quantitative strategies across a broad range of asset classes in global markets around the clock. Tower is staffed by employees proficient in diverse backgrounds such as mathematics, computer programming, physics, law, economics, engineering, finance, and more. As of 2022, Tower has over 1,000 employees in its global staff. Albert An serves as the CEO of the firm from 2019.

Legal issues

In 2014 Tower Research's wholly-owned subsidiary Latour Trading, which sometimes accounted for 9% of U.S. stock trading, was fined a record $16 million for violating the

net capital rule The uniform net capital rule is a rule created by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") in 1975 to regulate directly the ability of broker-dealers to meet their financial obligations to customers and other creditors. Broker-dealers ...

. Latour deliberately mis-estimated its exposure to risk and traded despite not holding enough capital. In 2019 Tower Research was fined $67.4 million for manipulating the markets in

E-mini E-minis are futures contracts that represent a fraction of the value of standard futures. They are traded primarily on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's Globex electronic trading platform. E-mini contracts were first launched in 1997 for the S&P 500 ...

financial futures contracts by spoofing. Tower traders placed thousands of orders for futures contracts that it never intended to execute. Three traders were criminally charged and two pled guilty in the case. Tower subsequently settled a class-action lawsuit for $15 million. In 2021 a suit alleging spoofing by Tower Research brought by Korean investors was decided in favor of Tower when the court ruled that trading on the Korean exchange was not subject to the U.S.

Commodity Exchange Act Commodity Exchange Act (ch. 545, , enacted June 15, 1936) is a federal act enacted in 1936 by the U.S. Government, with some of its provisions amending the Grain Futures Act of 1922. The Act provides federal regulation of all commodities and fut ...

Locations

Tower is headquartered in New York, with additional offices in Chicago, South Charleston, Montreal, London, Amsterdam, Gurgaon, GIFT City, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

References

External links

*{{Official, https://www.tower-research.com/ Financial services companies of the United States Financial services companies established in 1998