Faster and better traders or new kinds of market manipulation?

The data show that high-frequency trading plays an essential role in the functioning of modern capital markets. Therefore, the activities of high-frequency traders should also be considered from the perspective of protecting capital markets from criminal market abuse, especially since some of the strategies they use are highly controversial. There are, however, significant differences in the opinions on how high-frequency trading influences capital markets and how fair its specific strategies are. High-frequency traders are considered by some to be simply faster and better than other traders, while others suggest that they use fraudulent methods. Because high-frequency trading is a tool that can be used differently, the goal of the paper is to analyse these specific strategies of high-frequency traders, which raise concerns regarding the criminal prohibition of manipulation. To gain a broader perspective, once the essence of these strategies is explained, they are assessed from the point of view of the commonalities among definitions of manipulation as a crime in the European Union and the United States.