In an article for the Connecticut Law Review, an attorney for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission argues that certain practices utilized by high-frequency traders may violate the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC Rules. The author, Greg Scopino, focuses on the practice of "pinging," or an HFT’s use of small test orders to determine whether a large trader is in the market. While some have compared the practice to front running, Scopino finds that a more apt comparison is to other manipulative practices such as marking the close, spoofing, or wash trading. Scopino notes that institutional traders such as mutual funds may have recourse against high-frequency traders though private rights of action.
The full article can be found here.