While Europe has been focused on its grand regulatory projects that touch nearly every area of the financial markets, an attempt to curb one aspect of the modern landscape came from Germany in 2013, in the form of the Act for the Prevention of Risks and the Abuse of High-Frequency Trading, known as the HFT law for short.

The Bundestag, Germany's federal parliament, approved the act on February 28, 2013, and it entered into force on May 15 of that year. It had been a sensitive period for HFT, which was criticised for the US Flash Crash in May 2010, a sudden 1,000-point plunge and recovery of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and an incident in August 2012 in which a rogue algorithm lost so much in 45 minutes it bankrupted broker-dealer Knight Capital, which eventually merged with Getco in July 2013 to form KCG.