Addressing concerns that high-speed trading firms unfairly benefited from licensing direct feeds, Business Wire, a press release distribution service owned by Berkshire Hathaway, will no longer allow the practice. The decision, the company says in a statement, in part responds to a story critical of the practice in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal.

“There was nothing wrong in Business Wire serving these handful of HFTs directly,” the company said. “These traders had absolutely no time advantage in receiving material news from Business Wire, which... disseminates news simultaneously and in real-time to all market participants, and in accordance with Regulation Fair Disclosure. “

That regulation, commonly known as Reg FD, demands equal access to company news by all investors, without preferential treatment. Critics of high-speed trading, and the growing practice of selling direct content distribution, complain that the practice, at the very least, violates the intent of the rule because even a millisecond edge can shift market prices and give those firms a trading advantage.

Business Wire was among the media companies pressured by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who dubbed direct news feeds “”insider trading 2.0”

“Small groups of privileged traders have created unfair advantages for themselves  by combining early glimpses of critical data with high-frequency trading – super-fast computers that flip tens of thousands of shares in the blink of an eye,” he wrote in a recent opinion piece published by the Albany Business Review. “This new generation of market manipulators has devised schemes that allow them to suck all the value out of market-moving information before it hits the rest of the street.”

Previously, Schneiderman, who praised the Business Wire decision, brokered an agreement with Thomson Reuters to stop giving a select group of clients access to potentially market-moving information in the University of Michigan's Survey of Consumers two seconds before other subscribers saw it.  

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