Yes, because it makes it very clear you have no idea of what you speak of, as you don't even know enough to use the correct terms for things.
Front running is to act on confidential information in the market to the detriment of the initiator of the information. Once something is no longer confidential, ie the customer order has been processed, and all the information is open, then there can no longer be any front running.
This is the same argument I've heard before. You give a narrow definition for front running and declare there is no front running by your specific and out dated definition that you set.
What's missing is you actually confronting the problem of people seeing orders and buying based on those orders before the original orders go through. What is your term for that? Playing a game of definitions is a diversion from actually talking about the problem.
What’s the big problem with calling other, problematic practices that are definitionally not front-running by another, less confusing name?
Imagine a public official caught taking bribes and calling that embezzlement, blackmail, or driving under the influence of alcohol. Makes about as much sense to me.
> the problem of people seeing orders and buying based on those orders before the original orders go through.
That would be frontrunning, and illegal, as far as I understand. I don’t think it matters if there’s two parties colliding to commit the same crime.
Are you maybe referring to payment for order flow, which also has its problems (but ironically on average yields price improvements over NBBO for retail traders!), but is not that?
What do you mean by "buying the order of somebody ahead of you"? Can you describe it in a bit more detail so we can see if there's an established name for that?
> people seeing orders and buying based on those orders before the original orders go through
This literally cannot happen unless someone is breaking a law. An order is not visible until after it has executed. What can happen is some actor want to get a better price for their order and thus split up the order into multiple orders that it tries to execute simultaneously. Then someone can act on one of those that process quicker before a second of those split up orders end up executed. And that is fine - propagating changes of price quickly between multiple separate market places is a good thing as it lowers the transaction overhead in general.
Front running is to act on confidential information in the market to the detriment of the initiator of the information. Once something is no longer confidential, ie the customer order has been processed, and all the information is open, then there can no longer be any front running.