Bart Chilton, who was a high-profile and vocal adversary of high-speed trading when he served as commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), has become a lobbyist for the industry six months after resigning.
Chilton, who famously labeled high-frequency traders as ‘cheetahs’ while in office at the CFTC, will work as an adviser to the Modern Markets Initiative (MMI), a lobby group funded by HFT firms including Quantlab Financial, Hudson River Trading, Tower Research Capital and Global Trading Systems.
He will work for the group through lobby firm DLA Piper, which hired him as a senior policy in April after he left the CFTC. MMI has retained DLA Piper to help ‘advocate for fair, transparent electronic markets for all investors,’ the firms says.
In his seven years as a commissioner, Chilton gave a series of speeches calling for a crackdown on HFT, including a speech delivered in 2011 in which he said, in reference the HFT firms: `If markets are going to be efficient and effective and less volatile, we need to cage the cheetahs.’
As a CFTC commissioner Chilton also stated that HFT reminds him of the TV show World’s Scariest Animal Attacks and a described the electronic trading system as a ‘problem predator issue.’ He called for increased regulation and the creation of ‘kill switches’ capable of immediately ceasing all HFT in the case of an error such as those that prompted flash crashes.
Chilton strikes a different tone in his new role, however. ‘The role and benefits of high-frequency trading are misunderstood by many,’ Chilton says in a press release issued by his new firm. ‘Through education, transparency and the right type of constructive regulation, HFT’s role will be accepted and endorsed as essential to today’s modern markets. The US markets are the envy of the world and we must keep them that way.’
