You're now on the archive server. Commenting has been disabled.
Multiple Choice Take Home Exam On Thin Markets From Themis Trading
A good take home "exam" on what happens in thinly traded markets, courtesy of Themis Trading:
Section III : Trading Thin Issues
Situation: You are responsible, either as an agency broker or as a
buyside trader, to execute a buy order, monster block of 2,500 shares,
in APU, Amerigas Partners. The date is January 14th,
2010. What can you expect to happen should you send 2,500 shares to buy
at the market pre-open? It closed at $40.77 on January 13th, and there
is no news on the stock.
(A) You can expect a fill within $0.15 of the
$40.77 close. The specialist at the post will add liquidity and
maintain a fair and orderly market, and fill you at perhaps $40.90 –
$41.00, as the stock had been trading up over the past few days, and
the specialist will allow himself some profit room by shorting you the
stock a tad higher, so that he can buy back his short and make perhaps
$0.10 or so.
(B) You can expect a fill at $42.94, up over 5%
from the prior close. The automated prop trading “HFT Specialist” will
bless you with their liquidity by shorting you the stock up 5%, with
full knowledge that no regulatory authority will watch and care, and no
self regulatory officials at the chosen exchange will even look at the
transaction, as it is inside the “erroneous trade” policy at that
exchange, which is at a threshold of +/- 250% of the stock’s prior
traded price. The HFT Specialist will short you the stock at $42.94,
and buy it back (see 9:30.06 trades that total the same amount as that
opening print) for $41.00, making $1.94 as their reward for “risking”
their capital and providing you liquidity.
(C) A fish in a chandelier
Answer and Explanation:
If you answered (c) you are in the wrong class. Abstract Thought is in Room 304, not 403.
If you answered (A), you are a dinosaur. This is not 2003. Your
thought process makes no sense in today’s world. Go back to 1963, take
a few days off vacationing in the Pocono’s Mount Airy Lodge in your
Chevrolet Impala Wagon Deluxe. Buy a pair or Pro Keds with the Blue and
Red stripe on the outside sole. And go work out the remainder of your
working career at Walmart as a greeter. You have dinner at Macaroni
Grill with the family at 5:15pm
If you answered (B), congratulations! You understand our market
structure. You understand our regulatory environment! You have
adjusted! A job awaits you at any number of consulting firms that cater
to today’s new style of trading. Your Bentley has been delivered to
your Rumson home. You have an 8:30 dinner reservation at 21 Club
awaiting you and Taylor Swift.
Folks, do not answer (A) or (C). Times have changed. (FWIW I really like Macaroni Grill. Really!)
»
- 5693 reads
- Printer-friendly version
- Send to friend
Similar Articles You Might Enjoy:
- Fed Transparency Petition Update
- Saluzzi Warns "Price Does Not Equal Value, And Everyone Is Chasing Price: This Is What Happened In Every Past Bubble"
- The Inability To Microsteal Or Nanosteal Is Absolute Armageddon For Buysiders
- Themis Trading: "Principal Program Trading Is A Way To Get The Market Go In Your Direction"
- High Frequency Trading Goliath GETCO Becomes NYSE Designated Market Maker
Themis - please quit your whining. And by the way, YOU are the
dinosaur. Here's a tip - with a no volume stock, break up your order!
Now go back to writing your anti-HFT papers...It's amazing clients pay
you for your execution "expertise".
The question was:
"What can you expect to happen should you send 2,500 shares to buy at the market pre-open?"
Anyone with half a brain would break the order up, but that wasn't a choice, or even an answer to the question.
2500 shares is 10% of the avg daily volume in this POS stock. If you try to do that much in one trade you are obviously gonna move the market a huge amount. Anyone who doesn't understand this should not be trading.
The guys are whiny jerks that *slam* the market with a "fat finger" sized trade and then get pissed off that they lost money. Screw you Themis.
Lighten up anon. He at least represents an ethical standard we should aspire to. We may not ever get back there but if we don't at least aspire to it I can guarantee you we won't get there. It is the infantile and ethics-challenged people represented by your view that are driving this downward spiraling, at accelerating speed, environment we still quaintly call a market. By the way, if you still define this as a "market" you're nearly as much of a dinosaur as Themis. krb
I hate people who bitch under the identity ANONYMOUS
Because "curbyourrisk" is so revealing?? Or clever??
uh.
Don't you have an execution platform that will break up the trade for you and ship the order to different exchanges?
Hello?
Not only that but there were no Wal-Marts or Macaroni Grills in 1963.
So unless you are trading the top 100
liquid stocks or so (or is it now down to
10 or 20) you are being scammed?
Which would mean the markets have no
depth?
We now live in a lawless society. There will be no red flags, no prosecution, just a few investigations that will be stonewalled into nothing, and useless hearings televised on c-span.
For example:
http://hotair.com/archives/2010/01/13/sec-hides-aig-bailout-documents-un...
why not put limit order 41.00 and wait ? I don't get it...
You cant hold the order...............if the client instructed "to buy"
Why would you have gone in at the market in this environment?
And buying AMO can be just as bad as buying AMC.
I am sure the client didn't mean buy it rightnow. Perhaps she meant buy it at the best price, as would be the mandate for a financial advisor anyway.
Absent discretionary authority, time and price are not the broker's choice. Ya gotta just throw it to the wolves. Sorry.
apparently, you don't have to buy stock. i know it sounds crazy but, believe it or not, one is not required to pay up or make any purchase whatsoever.
complaining about a crappy spread today for your own mock-HFT order fills is one thing ... bitching about how HFT makes "the markets" impossible is entirely another.
if a market you are playing in has those who are faster, smarter and more resourceful than you are, then why not move on to the next market; ie. don't play.
in the words of lil wayne as per HFT: "you can wear a condom but you can't come here."
and for those just giddy about barney frank and his band of merry fools marching retail across the Rubicon to the Gravina Bridge to Nowhere ... just wait n see what happens to your bid / ask spread once HFT is effectively neutered for folks like myself and left solely to the purview of market makers. retail and congress have not the slightest clue what the hell they are talking about let alone actually doing ... and possibly the greatest pyrrhic victory of all tragedy of the commons is just 'round the bend. friggin geniuses.
"once HFT is effectively neutered for folks like myself and left solely to the purview of the mms"
So what you're saying is there isn't any
liquidity except that which is made by guys like
you? Just what I thought. Then bring
back the old days of 50 cent to $2
spreads. So that when somebody really
wants to buy or sell something, they know
what they're up against. Your skimming
nickels and dimes provides no service.
no.
i'm telling you, point blank, that if "HFT" is effectively neutered that what you think is a crappy market today will become two girls and a cup disgusting tomorrow.
sans 'HFT' the way barnie, congress & main street view it, there is nothing to stand on / float atop.
i don't employ flash, i just know to how to see some of it within the matrix, code & have an intimate knowledge of TA; works for me.
"... and possibly the greatest pyrrhic victory of all tragedy of the commons is just 'round the bend. friggin geniuses."
dude, it's like...already here. We are in the midst of the greatest Pyrrhic victory in the financial markets...evAR!
hmmm, is exclamation punctuation even needed there...hurrr
It is hrrr, right? I mean like I just watched The Watchmen for like the first times evar...man you guys really like it dark! Like in, let us steal from society and tere fore ourselves to enrich our-selfish self..."Grandma can eat cat-food tonight", dark.
yep, count the likes...
tj3
Accurate. As a buyer one would "check boxes" for opening cross, or trade on open on their implementation shortfall or vwap algo. The algo will look at avg volume for the last 20 days, which lets say is 5k shares, and send a slice to the open. Other buy side algos will do the same. The stock will move. HFT on the other side.
I dont think Themis is whining; I think they are just trying to make sure everyone understands how things have changed and adjust. Perspective. Something lacking in today's whiz kid algo makers.
There wasn't a D) None of the above
I trade thinly traded stocks all the time. Limit orders are your best friend and as others say, you can always break up the order.
Amen to that, funny how ignorant the public is of how their money gets invested, i was preaching this a while ago, if you can, get a self-directed 401k option, i have my wife's set up that way through fidelity and my mil's set up that way through schwab, at least that way you can invest without getting scalped too badly, plus you actually have some choice.
oh yuckety yuckety yuck. Are you and cuz andy insiders? Those JPM fellas must just hoot and guffaw waxing about ignoramuses like me. Wouldn't want to be an insider, though, when the roaming hoards take to the streets......'deserve' will have everything to do with it....
please do tell
If you are buying for your own account, you would have to be an idiot to throw in a market order for 2500 on a stock that trades 74000 per day.
thank you
I think his real point was that market makers can clip you for $5,000.00 and no one gives a crap.
Don't think anyone is guaranteed a deep market. If high liquidity is very important, you will be limited in the companies you can invest. Or might have to "work" the order a bit. If you want instant execution on a thin stock, it comes at a price. There are ways of avoiding the price.
Why is this stuff hard? Is everyone suppose to be able to do what they want at the price they want?
Entitlement mentality abounds.
I'll take E. If my client told me to buy 2500 shares of this shit stock, I would have talked him out of it.
Are we going to have another one of those thousands MHZ market jolts or not today?Shall I buy,sell,or hold?we need an instant service from ZH providing us with the juice flowing in the market or not. I see the 10s declined from 3.82 to 3.7 something. An almost daily occurence nowadays. Between the TBs,corporate debt issuance(practically in the billions on daily basis)and the equity market,customer's deposits are depleting soon from banx coffers. Pretty soon they will need that trillion usd sitting in the FED as an insurance against Wall st. to not play games with the S&P. But they can always go back to BB"hey we ran out of deposits,what do we do now?"
Just looked on the otc website to see which market makers are still in business and doing anything. I saw that in 2001 there were 304 market makers on the Nasdaq, and now it is down to 147. When they laid off my entire trading floor back then, we all joked that they just wanted the 5 biggest banks to be 1 mio up on both sides. Well, here we are, getting every the closer. For all of you geniuses that think HFT provides liquidity, you need to wake up. Algo skimming has replaced everything in the markets. Good, Bad, or Indifferent. This is your bed that all of you/us have made. The elimination of many, many well paying jobs, for the elite few. I don't know what the breaking point is, but I think we are alot closer to it today than 10 years ago. If I would have filled those 2500 shares a buck and half higher, my own peers would have ripped me a new one. Base a system on no ethics, and don't punish the people that are misbehaving, sure that should work out really well. My father in law who just retired a few years ago, told me two days ago that he hopes to die early so he doesnt have to be a part of it. REALLY SAD
Put your money where your mouth is. Form a new market maker and under-price everyone like you think you can and riches will be yours. Until then, less whining.
let me see if i have this down: people complain if GS is on the other side of their trades (CDOs)... people complain if GS is on the same side of their trades (the disclosure letter from a few days ago).... and now people complain that GS and others will NOT take the other side of their trade at a price which they prefer.
lololol. good luck, Themis... too bad you f'd up this execution and got bitched out by your client.
Use limit orders even in reasonably liquid stocks during normal market hours having had to many quickie pops on my market orders. On order sizes that should not move the market. This from a company that is highly rated for execution. 2-3 years ago, did not have this issue, unless it was a volatile market. Algos?
Not to worry....we can all trade Citi back, forth
and sideways as that's where all the volume is these
days. Don't buy solvent illiquid stocks, buy insolvent ones
with lots of liquidity. Let's go scalp some pennies,
everybody. Yee-haw.
Tyler:
Pro Keds are in, Macroni Grill is back, the Poconos always sucked.
This guy deserved what he got. If he had routed to NYSE the spec would have put out an indication, attracting sellers/shorts, and he would have ended up with a price w/in 15c of the close.
Instead, he's a darwin nominee.
Are you makin fun of my pro keds? You're just jealous you don't own a pair.
Why buy 2500 of APU?
Only an idiot would not put a limit on an order.
Heh, heh...there is an underlying belief
throughout the whole industry that if you
are naive, you DESERVE to be raped. Did
you catch Blankfein's incredulous defense
yesterday of selling toxic dogshit?
To paraphrase: "They were professionals
and they wanted it, (so what was I to
do, even though I knew better")
no, anon, it's got nothing to do with "Deserving to be raped." Themis's question was regarding an agency broker or a buyside trader - both of whom's JOB it is to be experts in execution. THAT IS THEIR JOB. if they cannot do their job properly, it's not someone else's fault. it's not someone else's fault that no one was willing to sell them stock at a price lower than $42 or whatever price they got filled at. It's not someone else's fault that they had some sort of erroneous view of being entitled to a fill within 20c of the close.
It's not someone else's fault that the buy side trader or agency broker made an erroneous assumption about what would happen if they entered 10% of a day's volume as a market on open order. It's the trader's fault, and it's got zip and pip to do with high frequency trading.
as for Blankfein - i think his point there is an important one. He had clients begging him for long exposure to the CDO market - so he sold it to them. What is he supposed to do? tell them no? what about now in the stock market? I think the market is pretty richly valued. Zerohedge certainly seems to think so also. What is a broker supposed to do when a client comes begging for long exposure? say "no, the market is obviously overvalued, it's a giant ponzi scheme and the government is manipulating the data" ??? guess what - you can't say that. the broker's role is NOT an advisory role - which is why Blankfein made that defense.
Under EMH you can never pay a wrong price for a stock.
Looks like somebody has no clue whatsoever about how the opening crosses work.
Are you aware of how much stock high frequency guys fill at the market (penny spread) literally one second after opening and closing imbalances are released? Millions and millions and millions of shares. In this stock there was either a) no high frequency firm monitoring this stock or b) no stock available to sell/short.
Your point must be that we need more HFT and more lenient short sale rules to make sure this doesn't happen again.
The 42.94 print occurred on Nasdaq not the NYSE....if you send an order to Nasdaq you can't expect the NYSE specialist to stand in for you.
APU is a NYSE listed name, but the trade in question was done on Nasdaq. If you send your order to Nasdaq you can't bitched when the NYSE specialist doesn't step in.
This is all a bunch of BS. Nobody places market orders pre-market. In fact, my broker - whic is the largest retail broker in the USA, doesn't even allow pre/post market "market orders", only "limit orders".
Mostly I agreee with ZH, but this constant carping is too much.
I've been trading in/out of hedged long positions in names like COP, MCD, DSX and VZ for several months now and have been doing fine.
I'm 50% cash at all times and if the next big one comes, I'll have minimum 50% of my capital to make moves at the next big nadir.
In the meantime, heres what we know:
1) The SEC is a joke
2) The Treasury and FED are killing us with too much fake $$
3) The Wall Stret bonuses are an outrage
4) The Vampire Squid is evil and should not be trusted
5) The AIG bailbout was a mockery against good sense
6) The GM/GMAC bailout is at minimum a 10 year black hole of wasted money intended to curry favor with the unions
7) The Bid/Ask numbers we see are 70%+ fake - being held aloft by HFT scammers while they front-run us on secret dark pools
8) The SPY keeps getting kicked down the road by massive aftermarket call activity
9) Almost all market gains lately have been aftermarket
10) There's nothing we can do about any of this.
Have I missed anything?
I'm no fan of the HFT's however you picked a poor example to use. if you put a market order in pre-market on a thin POS you deserve what you got. You have no idea how to trade
I am no fan of the HFT's however you picked a poor example to use. If you put in a market order pre market on a POS thin stock - you have no idea how to trade
Is the chandelier on? If so, then slow cooked fish is the best option.
Round and round the mulberry bush, we love to chase (among other things) the weasel.
POP goes your stop loss (buy).
Mister Margin says hello!
We love you earners, we really do!
These Themis guys keep getting more and more entertaining.
It is simply amazing that they have any clients.
It's one thing to place an order pre-market for your client in a thinly traded stock because they insist (and perhaps the folks over at Themis did try to caution them that this would be a stupid market order to place).... but to make a point of how poor your execution was for your client when it would seem that the broker was at least partially culpable - and then tell the world about it - well, that's just funny!
If I didn't already have a dim view of Joe and Sal, I would have speculated that this note came from a competitor...
I wonder how much the client paid for their execution.
Low volume issues? How bout a low volume exchange...looks like NYSE will post the lowest volume in many a moons today. Its scary how thin it is...pumpers a couple weeks ago saying "wait till earnings season" and volume will kick in...it has'nt, still in decline....
So now its "wait till the retail sideline money comes in"....uh, there ain't none!
An open order is just chum for the sharks. If you don't believe it, just try that shit on NYMEX.
I thought $43 as I was reading the question.
PS if you live in Rumson, you miught go there, but if you were born in the neighborhood and are a local, you'd be better served just driving around the corner to go to Val's Tavern and getting a Lobster Pizza with hot marinara sauce, and a pitcher of Yuengling. Ms Swift will thank you.
I'll spare you the reading. The gist of it is ".... So after a few beers, we've decided that instead of investing in proper infrastracture and a solid client team, we'll just hire a few morons and publicly announce how they mishandled some simple situation, but in the light that the market raped them. Besides, blogosphere will love it.!
person 2: yeah, that should do it!"
A buddy of mine had a friend purchase a preferred stock through Scwab a few years ago. He filled 6 points above the last trade on a $13 preferred.
He saved on the commission tho.
the answer is d) you should use LIMIT orders only pre-open and probably not be trading as a professional if you don't know this.
Come on people. Its really a silly example but I guess its more about the point of it, DON'T DO THIS. Anybody been around longer than the last 7 years.
I think HFT is a scam, flash orders a crime etc.. They have ruined what was once very tradable markets, but these practices are legal for now. You have to use your head and adapt to the situation. You don't think the boys in the SP pit would not rape you on a market order in a slow market? I saw it happen constantly to any unknowing paper coming in. In the grain pits you better expect to get raped as a customer (although not nearly as bad perhaps) with a market order to the wrong ethically loose broker. One had to direct to a specific broker or deal with a house they knew had some integrity. I won't even attempt to explain how horrendous the New York markets were, still are. They made the CME boys look good and CBOT like angels. This is how many of the leaches in the pits made their money...ripping off customer paper. Looking over the shoulder of their buddy who fills customer orders and front running. Some of it today probably does provide liquidity like many honest locals used to unfortuately most today look to exploit. The current stuff is no different....leaches. It's not right, and especially today could and should be changed, but its not illegal, so just don't be the sucker...know the game.
Check Themis's blog. They did not, nor did their customer effect this trade guys. They are just commenting on a system that has degraded (evolved?) into one where major firms employ algorithms and automated strategies to take advantage of any human error, to rape. With no oversight.
Every defense here pretty much says the same thing, that anyone who doesn't check a box, or makes a mistake in not adjusting where their router goes pre-open, deserves the rape, and it is the societal responsibility of CSFB, Goldman, Citadel, whoever..... to rape them.
And if you walk in Hell's Kitchen at 1:00am, you deserve to be beaten robbed and raped. The defenses of the raping in this comment section are chock full of kids with no perspective. Glass-Steagal regs are a big reason why we did not have a crash in 70 years plus. Its dismantling, and the wild west unrestrained attitudes of greed, brought us where we are now. You guys wat their to be no oversight or regulation at all in the markets? Well enjoy the new land where investors dont matter, and the game is about which institutions can game and mame as quickly and systematically as possible.
Keep up the good work Sal and Joe. For every PeterPAUL you read here, there are 100 who agree with you.
NASDAQ does its best to provide a logical and consistent On Open execution system. It isn't perfect. Sometimes there are imbalances like this. This used to be much, much, much more common. There isn't anything sinister about it, its just that, in the real world, crossing blocks of stock efficiently isn't a perfect science.
I like how your premise is that a MM takes down 10% of the volume of a stock in 15 cents (we used to tick in 1/16) and then buy it lower somehow. Umm you are buying large volume and they are supposed to risk the chance you are an insider trader and the stock rally's 10 dollars to make 10 cents? Somehow a MM at a post would do this but a computer wouldn't? Maybe the post guys were just dumber and that made it easier for you to trade? Again if you think the markets made are unfair, then make a tighter market, size up, and put all these HFT out of biz? In the old days you could rely on a cousin in the pit in NY, now you have to think? Boo hoo. You sound like an auto worker (we used to do it worse, and people bought our cars, man the world is so messed up now whaaa whaaa)