32 Replies to “It’s Probably Nothing”

  2. I suspect the One cent “slot” machine I play at Niagara Casino has an identical internal algo within it as does the NSDQ or does the Asian trading bot.
    I don’t often win!

  3. It’s just the normal Skim Algo used by members of Organized Crime..Same..Same

  4. And while the brave defenders of our society stand up to the Muslims to stop them from spreading their culture among us, The zionists, who control many aspects of usery and who have been key in developing the capitalist market systems, sneak around profiting from misery and driving the simple minded gentile into the ground. But never mind, just keep bombing Libya. It’s way more important than that boring stock market stuff which you don’t understand anyway. Bombing Muslims though – now that we can understand.

  5. INP-
    Not that maybe a few million MIT trained Chinese couldn’t pull it off.
    Full Retard Troll.

  6. Nope just someone with an open mind and an equal opportunity hater. In the end George Soros and the zionists that control the Federal Reserve have done more damage to western culture than Osama Bin Laden could ever do. Open your eyes.

  8. Hey INP, haven’t you guys punched off yet? I mean, given all the budget cuts, does the Canadian Human Rights Commission allow for overtime?

  9. “George Soros and the socialists that control the Federal Reserve”
    Their, fixed that for you.

  10. “Nope just someone with an open mind ”
    Well, then that explains it, doesn’t it? Your mind is open and all you brains leaked out.
    Makes sense.

  11. When everybody is in free fall, there’s not much point in saying to the next guy, your parachute didn’t open.

  12. Peter O’Donnell
    Ha! good one. I also found this comment from the link provided most interesting.
    by quintago
    on Thu, 07/14/2011 – 13:26
    #1456680
    Fiat back to gold
    and
    Markets back to humans
    Problem solved

  13. To the bear and my other insultors: I want the HRCs scrapped. Completely and totally. And multiculturalism too. Also, radical environmantalists are loathsome vile creatures with delusions of global conquest. I also really really hate the UN. And hey, wasn’t it the UN that created Israel? Ironlc that. Especially for everyone who loves the UN and hates Israel and vice versa. Square that circle. And anyway my humble apologies to Kate for posting something that caused other less focussed individuals to sidetrack the debate. Good night.

  14. They’re going to keep ratcheting this type of trading up until they really freakin’ break something. Then there will be much covering of butts and pointing of fingers.
    Business as usual, in other words.

  16. Somebody losing money in the stock market again?
    Can’t outsmart the inanimate objects?
    Boo hoo hoo.
    Try again. There are plenty of opportunities out there to make money.

  18. These guys have done what I would have considered to be impossible — they’ve made spammers look like legitimate businessmen. These guys are basically parasites who, if the SEC was doing its job, would be in leg irons picking up garbage beside freeways for the next 5-10 years. That’s actually far better than they deserve, but they’re “white collar criminals”.
    If you look at the time of the event depicted, everything happened in a span of 2 seconds but the “trades” occurred in about a 1 second period. This system is designed to create instabilities in the market and that 1 in 10,000 year crash might happen milliseconds from now. I wonder how they’d feel is a botnet decided to do an extended DDOS on their servers for a while and, as far as I’m concerned, they represent a perfectly legitimate target for any hacker who has the urge to do something good for society. Just goes to show that not all terrorists are islamofascists.

  19. Did I miss the gist of the post? I gathered from the post that well connected computer geeks are doing this shit.

  20. You know, houses in Canada are still CATASTROPHICALLY overvalued, given the actual productivity of the Canadian worker (I know a family that spends 82% of their monthly take servicing the mortgage on their admittedly gorgeous house). People owe too much and produce too little. We dish out cash to all kinds of international welfare junkies, we’ve pretty much banned free speech in Canada, but no, the HFT trading bots are the true problem.
    The problem isn’t the instability from HFT (I am one myself, and I can assure you that HFT actually builds resilience into the system IF your underlying fundamentals are sound). HFT trades are largely among HFT traders themselves, mostly large institutional investors. Trading frequency can’t in and of itself collapse the global trading system for long. Computer outages aren’t any worse than when the Big Board shuts off due to too many downticks, or like that day in September, 2001. Big losses, largely recovered by the end of the year.
    What HFT can do is supply the shock that kicks the entire rotten, barely-standing edifice to the ground. Just ask the Greeks, the Portuguese, the Irish, the Spanish. They too of course, are shopping around for someone else to blame for the fact that they spent too much, and don’t produce much of anything, and they want to go after traders, and hedge funds, and even the ratings agencies! Seriously, when last did you buy a Portuguese car? Or a Greek-built steel garage? How about a Spanish computer? Oh wait, the Greeks, a nation producing a slightly salty and bitter fruit, and Ouzo, claims to be the living-standard equivalent of Germany. And therein lies the problem that the HFT bots will expose. That there are countries like Greece, that are actually, factually already bankrupt. The US, is already bankrupt, but they cannot say that, otherwise the global system as we know it will correct. I see the problem as the postponing of that long-overdue correction.

  21. bbss-
    Stub quote trades not withstanding, right?
    I’m sure sub-penny quote stuffing is for liquidity purposes.
    Anarchic? Well, that’s a horse of a different color. And is most definitely not trading. (I am a trader.) Using flop speed to front run orders and steal a penny is impressive risk taking on your part.
    The last part is a stupendous piece of analysis that seems to miss a few salient economic data points. Do you even understand the concept of the balance sheet of the average American? Or, what’s the distorting impact of capital fleeing China on the Vancouver real estate market?
    Here’s another one: What is the inherent flaw written into a single stock HFT bot, if exchange rules are observed as a parameter in the code?

  22. The Soviet Union went bankrupt because it was the world’s biggest welfare state. In due time, the nations of Western Europe, the United States and Canada will follow that path. Our welfare state may not have been quite as big as a percentage of GDP, but it’s still just as unsustainable.

  24. I mean, seriously Mel, there are people who still think trading frequency (and not a leverage crisis) is what’s ailing Europe’s economy. Bankruptcy, as you know, is simply a term…

  25. Of course, capital exits China as long as their government allows it. They still shoot people for tax evasion over there, and the only qualification required for service in a Chinese court is a University degree, not even a Law degree (their response is “well, would rather we dropped the requirement to a high school diploma?”).
    Very different market, China, as you should know if you do business there.

  26. Where did I bring up Europe?
    Capital flight? Please.
    Hot money is always “in flight” looking for the trade of least resistance. Regulation should be, in my opinion only, designed to protect the consumer and give all market participants the same chance. Your HFT systems do neither and is why the US stock market is reduced to computers trying to steal from each other, at an estimated 70% of the daily volume. I personally think it’s higher, and it’s still front-running, and therefore, theft.

  27. Come on, Melinda, tell me you don’t also want to ban short selling as well.
    Tell me you don’t seriously believe the markets are struggling because of HFT systems.
    Firstly, HFT is for large-scale institutional investors, and sometimes the right bunch of underpaid nuclear physicists (what do you expect when a bloody baseball player makes millions, and recent PhD’s in astrophysics make $30 an hour if they’re lucky…) But last time I looked it’s not illegal for you to gather up a group of your own PhD’s in CompSci and Finance, and jump in the game.
    As an individual trader, sorry, you can’t compete with HFT systems, and you’re never going to. I don’t know who ever led you to believe you could. But to use that as an excuse to run screaming form the markets as some people have around here? Sheesh. I know plenty of people who have made good money doing nothing but holding long positions. But of course that means doing research. Look on the bright side – we live in an age in which it has never been easier to access information about the true state of the vast majority of publicly-traded companies. Sorry, but the glory days of the 1990’s basement and pyjamas day-trader is over.

  28. Only naked shorting should be banned, but then again, the chances of a clearing corp getting caught allowing it is more than just slim.
    The markets are struggling because the retail investor worries about two things. Firstly, investing in the market involves a leap of faith and a sense of trust that economics will win out, the events of Oct. ’08 through March ’09, combined with May 6, ’10, betrayed those feelings. They took their money out and have stayed out.
    I have no intention of playing in a currently legal HFT environment, but I do use their weaknesses to my advantage. I’m sorry you have neither the experience nor the knowledge base to understand how free and unfettered marketplaces work, as opposed to the femtosecond cubicle where you’ve packed yourself. Go read some von Mises.

  29. Of course naked shorting can also prevent cornering. But we digress. These markets you assert I know nothing about – which markets are you referring to? Specifics please. You freely admit you have no intention of attempting to trade out of your beta’s. Well that is also markets self-regulating, no? Think HFT is all about femtoseconds, and not substantive, then why on earth aren’t you trading volatility? Heck and if you think HFT is about to get shut down, short the index like mad!
    But sorry there are still too many people out there still buying and selling and making money the old fashioned way for me to believe HFT is the big problemyou claim it is. I mean Melinda, please tell me you were long oil futures in April.

  30. I prefer to be light gamma, and short high theta. If I have to be long gamma, I’ll own the underlying, where the HFT’s don’t like to play, and the flow is too light for an algo to run. Beta works for MPT but, in the long run, is useless.
    Playing “how big was your last trade?” is a bar game.
    Naked shorting can be just as cornering, especially if the short is larger than the issued, but you wouldn’t know when that has happened either, but it has.
    You really should learn more about the markets that you are experimenting in. I’d be happy to point out some solid reads for you.

  31. Well Melinda, sounds like you’re doing just fine. So help me out here: why are you so sketched out by HFT and not arbitraging? Unless you don’t believe in market efficiency as a goal.

  32. Arbitrage is an efficiency sidebar. It works because it extracts economic value from mispricing. HFT, a private market, does no such thing and merely facilitates front-running, which, in a single stock market, is all it really is.
    And front running is theft. Maybe you don’t believe that, more’s the pity.

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