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“The liquidity that you see is not really there,” Mr. Decker says. “It’s not a fair game.”

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He says the new business reality that has emerged over the past five years is forcing him to do more “upstairs” trading — filling orders through privately negotiated deals involving blocks of stock that don’t take place on traditional markets. While Mr. Decker says he would like to see changes, he is adamant he’s not trying to turn back the clock to the days of high commissions and wide spreads between the bid and ask prices for securities.

“It’s not like white hats and black hats. There’s got to be a balance,” he says.

Financial regulators around the world are turning their attention to high-frequency trading and trying to find that balance to ensure markets are efficient and fair.

Many in the financial industry, from bankers to regulators and even some former practitioners, acknowledge that the growing practice of lightning fast electronic trading needs to be monitored — a move that appears more likely as international regulators ponder curbs in the wake of wild market swings and technology glitches.

High-frequency trading, in which algorithms read market activity and buy and sell securities in fractions of seconds, may have delivered some benefits to the market, such as greater liquidity and lower costs. But critics say it has created an uneven playing field in which the fastest machines and least regulated players can disrupt trading in order to squeeze profits from tiny differences in prices across markets.