Mat-Su College professor published in Wall Street Journal

PALMER — Surely everyone has a bunch of answers to the question “what do you do for fun?”

But, just as surely, few of them have the same answer as Mat-Su College Assistant Professor of Business Administration and Economics Holly Bell, who said that the article she had published Feb. 8 in The Wall Street Journal is what she does in her spare time.

“This is what I do for fun,” she said, before following up with a joke, “because I love hate mail.”

The article, “Regulator, Go Slow on Reigning in High Speed Trading,” expresses an opinion not particularly fashionable right now.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten a lot,’ she said on the topic of hate mail. But it is the dominant reaction to the article. “You never hear from people who agree with you. You hear from people who don’t agree with you.”

So what is her opinion? Perhaps a brief primer on high-frequency trading with some help from Prof. Bell would help.

In a nutshell, high-frequency trading is a type of stock trading that involves thousands of small trades each day netting tiny amounts of money that add up to larger profits. It’s a way of taking advantage of small fluctuations in a stock’s price and is accomplished using computers and algorithms.

In 2009, Bell said, 65 percent of trades were done this way.

“This is a time when we said, ‘this is scary. Things are picking up. We have all of these things going on,’” Bell said.

Back then and even as soon as a year ago, Bell said, her opinion on high-frequency trading would have been that more regulation is needed to rein in this kind of trading.

“If you had asked me a year ago I would have said it’s terrible. There’s so many dangers, so many risks associated with this speeding up of the market,” Bell said.

But having done the research as part of the Doctorate of Business Administration program she’s in at George Fox University in Oregon, she said she thinks the market might be sorting itself out.

She said the volume of high-speed trading is starting to drop, which indicates to her that market forces are at work. As long as there is profit to be made, more people will jump into the market until all the profit is gone.

“What’s happening is profits are approaching zero in this market and so the article is mostly about, ‘is it too late to regulate?’” Bell said.

Whatever it’s about, Mat-Su College was clearly very happy to have one of its professors featured as an expert in a national publication. In a college press release, Talis Colberg, director of Mat-Su College, said that it’s very unusual for a professor in a remote state like Alaska to be recognized as that kind of expert.

“For Professor Bell to be approached by the Wall Street Journal as a contributor to the world’s leading financial publication is a remarkable accomplishment on her part,” Colberg says in the press release. “Professor Bell’s recognition is even more amazing given the reality that our campus is not even designated as a ‘research campus.’ She has done this in her ‘spare time.’”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.