HFT

Simply put, these four charts have to be seen to be believed. Presented with little comment, via Nanex, this is the 'market' we are supposed to trust...?

Today is the second time in three months that someone, or something, either leaked the Non-farm payroll data just ahead of its official release, or if not leaked then a trading algorithm manipulated the bond market ahead of the official data release by launching a "momentum ignition" (see here, here and here for much more on how HFT uses this strategy over and over to set trading bands) launch higher just ahead of the official data release at 8:30:00:0000 am that desperately needed to push 10 Year yields, already on the verge of a 2 year breakout, lower.

Lately, the parasitic, price manipulative "Office Space"-inspired HFT practice known as "spoofing" has been consistently in the news: a week ago, it was the third largest futures broker, Newedge, who made headlines following a "record" FINRA handslap. Then yesterday, a Red Bank, NJ-based HFT shop called Panther Energy Trading, and its sole owner Michael Coscia were fined $4.5 million and got a 1 year ban from the industry for engaging in the same activity. "Panther, based in Red Bank, New Jersey, and Coscia used a computer algorithm that placed and quickly canceled bids and offers in futures contracts for commodities including oil, metals, interest rates and foreign currencies. Panther and Coscia engaged in spoofing from August 8, 2011, to October 18, 2011, related to 18 futures contracts. The firm accumulated $1.4 million in profits by using the algorithm." While none of this is fundamentally new to any of our readers, we are happy to report that in conjunction with Nanex, we can now present documentary evidence of the Panther algo in action.

Facts are treasonous and dangerous in an empire of lies, fraud and propaganda. It is maddening to watch the country spiral downward, driven to ruin by a psychotic predator class, while the plebs choose to remain willfully ignorant of reality and distracted by their lust for cheap Chinese crap and addicted to the cult of techno-narcissism. We are a country running on heaping doses of cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias, an irrational belief in our national exceptionalism, an absurd trust in the same banking class that destroyed the finances of the country, and a delusionary belief that with just another trillion dollars of debt we’ll be back on the exponential growth track. The American empire has been built on a foundation of cheap easily accessible oil, cheap easily accessible credit, the most powerful military machine in human history, and the purposeful transformation of citizens into consumers through the use of relentless media propaganda and a persistent decades long dumbing down of the masses through the government education system. This national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche observed the same spectacle in the 19th century: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

Think Goldman would take accusations that it is, gasp, manipulating the RMBS, HFT, crude commodities market sitting down? Think again. Like every mollusc in self-preservation mode, here is Goldman's just released ink, pardon, press release saying all accusations about it are nothing but sheer rampant confusion. After all - Goldman simply makes markets. Move along.

The chart below lays out what lies in store (no pun intended) second half earnings as indicated by companies themselves.  What it shows is that optimism in corporate earnings (ignoring the persistent optimism in the economy which always without fail, leaves everyone disappointed despite the fifth ongoing year of QE) is once again misplaced and that EPS are set to disappoint, especially if the stock buyback wave - certainly not facilitated by the rise in interest rates - is finally over.

Following yesterday's disappointing results from Intel, and the IBM revenue miss, completing the sad state of Q2 earnings season for tech companies are the just reported GOOG and MSFT results, both which missed not only on the topline but also on the bottom line. Guess they didn't have billions in reserve releases and Available For Sale MTM fudges to confuse HFT algos and pundits with.

After every non-farm payroll report we provide our own breakdown of what the real unemployment rate is in a country in which the labor force participation rate has not been adjusted to normalize for the Second Great Depression. In the most recent such endeavor we found the "Real Unemployment Rate" to be 11.3%. Today, courtesy of the Post's John Crudele we find that our estimate was spot on not just from anyone, but the former head of the BLS himself: Keith Hall.

No, last week’s jobs report was not “strong”. It was just another edition of the “born again” jobs scam that has been fueling the illusion of recovery during the entire post-crisis Bernanke Bubble. In short, the US economy is failing and the welfare state safety net is exploding. And that means that the true headwind in front of the allegedly “cheap” stock market is an insuperable fiscal crisis that will bring steadily higher taxes, lower spending and a gale-force of permanent anti-Keynesian austerity in the GDP accounts. And for that reason, the Fed’s strategy of printing money until the jobs market has returned to effective “full employment” is completely lunatic. The bottom-line is that Bernanke is printing money so that Uncle Sam can keep massively borrowing, and thereby fund a simulacrum of job growth in the HES Complex. Call it the Bed Pan Economy. When it finally crashes, Ben Bernanke will be more reviled than Herbert Hoover. And deservedly so.

When we tapered our coverage of HFT manipulation and stock market abuse some time ago, we thought that the message had been heard loud and clear: high frequency trading is a sophisticated market manipulating parasite, whose only real function is to abuse market structure and integrity, by making conventional market manipulation practices more difficult to spot and identify. It turns out some, i.e., Newedge, thought they could still get away with traditional manipulative practices such as spoofing, layering, momentum ignition, wash trading, bypassing, and others, if only they were wrapped in an HFT blanket. It did so for four years from 2008 until 2011. As it turns out it was wrong, and in a stunning example of actually doing its job, FINRA fined Newedge, which is one of the largest futures brokers in the world and ranks third in terms of U.S. customer assets on deposit, a record $9.5 million.

EB heads to TV...and reflects on predictions from 2009's "A Grand Unified Theory of Market Manipulation"

Over the course of decades we have allowed ourselves to be corrupted by the love of material possessions, the lure of a debt based faux wealth, the money for nothing entitlement promises of dishonorable politicians, the evil of currency debasement, the effectiveness of mass media propaganda, and the belief that we could sacrifice freedom and liberty for promises of safety and security made by a cabal of powerful rich men. Power has been concentrated into the hands of the few, who operate in secrecy and despise the people. They don’t want transparency or open debate. Freedom of speech is nothing but a thorn in their side. They believe they are smarter than the serfs and have no morality when it comes to committing illegal acts and disregarding the Constitution. They are not acting in the public interest. Their abuse of power and looting of the national wealth have put us on a path towards a bloody revolution. This is not a time for conformity, obedience or submission. It’s time to stand up and expose the evil doers. It’s time to rally around those who care about this country. Who are the real traitors? You know the answer.

When everyone was throwing computing power at the 'momentum igniting', "can't lose", HFT-driven algo-trading world, it is perhaps little wonder that the opportunity to expropriate profits from an ever-decreasing pool of real money traders dwindles like a convertible arbitrage hedge fund in the 90s. Perhaps it was the writing on the wall we noted in February when GETCO's money-printing machine was reduced to pennies, but it seems the world of high-freaks is tearing itself apart. As the WSJ reports, two of the largest independent US high-frequency-trading firms are in early merger discussions - as a downturn in trading opportunities has spurred cutbacks. Of course, the firms claim this is a positive, "we're in accelerated growth mode, both organically and inorganically," but as one HFT analyst notes, "HFT is a volume business... If trading volumes are going down, that means it's tougher for prop shops to make money." The slowdown has forced some high-speed specialists to leave the business and with RGM and Allston (the two firms) having 280 staff, we suspect this week's initial claims may be bloated with PhDs.

To summarize, the SEC which admits it was clueless in analyzing the modern, fragmented market (yet which found definitively that the culprit for the May 2010 flash crash was Waddell and Reed, and nobody else, using what technology at the time, nobody knows), uses a platform developed by High Frequency Trading firm Tradeworx... to reach a conclusion that High Frequency Trading firms are innocent of every flash crash resulting from an HFT algo gone haywire...

"I am going to hit on some of the landmines that you can encounter within order-matching engines, and then I am going to give a forecast on, at least from my perspective, what’s going to happen over the course of 2013"