HFT

Regardless of whether a market is moving up or down, there is always someone making money somewhere. There are various examples every day – be it a billionaire selling a stock short (i.e., Herbalife) or a company selling a meal short on ingredients (i.e., horsemeat economics). Some methods are legitimate, and some are not. But one thing is for sure... energy markets are by no means immune to such collusion. The natural gas market is coming under increased scrutiny, as price movement ahead of the main event of the week – the weekly storage report – appears to be being manipulated by high-frequency trading (HFT). High-frequency trading is nothing new to financial markets, but it is new to the natural gas market. It has also spawned some wonderfully inventive names to describe the pre-storage report shenanigans. The best term by far has to be ‘banging the beehive’, which is where a flood of orders is sent to trigger a huge price swing immediately before the data is released. Regardless of how comical these names are, however, this creation of ‘synthetic momentum’ is market manipulation and is being investigated accordingly.

We noted yesterday the strange intraday pattern emerging in Silver price movements - the alarmingly predictable morning takedown of the precious metals when the NYMEX opens. It's a reality that we need to be eyes wide open about, as it underscores the challenges of being long in an asset that powerful players don't want to appreciate. And while it's important to understand the risks in play here (e.g. these raids may continue for longer than we think possible), we emphasize the importance for precious metal owners to hold fast with the courage of their convictions - ultimately fundamentals will prevail and gold and silver prices will rise to their true levels. So, if you decide to bet on the continued success of the status quo, your choices are easy: Get in the paper markets and go long. The Fed will be adding $85 billion of liquidity rocket fuel each month for the rest of the year to push the prices of your paper investments even higher. But if you choose the fundamentals, here are a few important guidelines to keep in mind.

There was a time back in 2009 when GETCO was the absolute titan of the high frequency trading arena, printing money with the reckless abandon of a Federal Reserve on full tilt. It even got its own profile piece in the WSJ in the summer of 2009: "Meet Getco, High-Frequency Trade KingMeet Getco, High-Frequency Trade King." However, the good days were not to last as shortly thereafter we got a flash crash, then we got three + years of Ben Bernanke's (and every other bank's) central planning and some $10 trillion in combined exogenous liquidity to prop up the market, both of which resulted in the complete loss of faith in a standalone stock market by the retail investor (and once the current unwind of the December rotation from stocks into savings accounts over capital gains tax fears ends, the outflows will resume especially as latest ICI data shows with the smallest inflow into domestic equities to date in 2013). And since retail orders no longer would feed the frontrunning, sub-pennying, quote churning, flash crashing juggernaut that is HFT, that meant less revenue and profit for algo master GETCO. How much less? A whopping 82% less in the nine months ended September 30, 2012 compared to a year prior, and 92% less when annualizing 2012 results compared to the firm's heyday in 2008, the year in which it made a record $430 million in net income. Getco's net income as of September 30, 2012: a tiny $25 million.

The first two months of the year have seen volatility crushed downward in this two month bullish rally in assets as new money came rushing into markets needing to get off to a positive start for the year. 

After having less than half the total US deposits back in 2005, China has pumped enough cash into the economy using various public and private conduits to make even Ben Bernanke blush: between January 2005 and January 2013, Chinese bank deposits have soared by a whopping $11 trillion, rising from $4 trillion to $15 trillion! We have no idea what the real Chinese GDP number is but this expansion alone is anywhere between 200 and 300% of the real GDP as it stands now. And more: between January 2012 and January 2013 Chinese deposits rose by just over $2 trillion. In other words, while everyone focuses on Uncle Ben and his measly $1 trillion in base money creation in 2013 (while loan creation at commercial banks continues to decline), China will have created well more than double this amount of money in the current year alone!

You know how we feel about special order-types and expert networks.  I'll save you the long-winded paragraph so you can keep selling AMZN.  Here is an HFT infographic

And now it's on us to mobilize and make sure at least one of us in each district contact our representatives and do what we can to inform them.  The longer this goes on, the more bad algo's will manipulate the system

The most cartoonish stock of all time just came out with results that can only be characterized as ugly. To wit:

• Q4 revenue of $21.27 billion missed expectations of $22.23 billion
• Q1 EPS of $0.21 missed expectations of $0.27;
• The firm guided top-line lower, seeing Q1 sales of $15-$16 billion, below the estimate of $16.5 billion
• The firm guided operating income much lower, seeing Q1 op income of ($285)-$65 Million on expectations of $261.4 MM
• The firm said the its physical books sales had the lowest growth in 17 years
• Total employees grew by 7,000 in the quarter and 32,200 Y/Y to a record 88,400
• Worldwide net sales Y/Y growth was the slowest in years at 23%, down from 30% in Q3 and 34% a year ago
• And, last and certainly least, LTM Net Income is now officially negative, or ($49) meaning as of this moment the firm with the idiotically high PE has an even more idiotic N/M PE.

... And the stock is soaring in the after hours. Thank you DE Shaw.

Hope is dying in the US. The performance of financial markets affects everyone. For savers and investors, these markets represent the means to an improved life, at least as they define it. We are twelve years into this new century and Americans are losing their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Twelve years in, the S&P 500 has returned a total of 14%. That puny return has not come close to covering the decline in purchasing power of the dollar during the same period. The country's financial condition is deplorable and cannot continue much longer. So, too is virtually everything else the government has touched whether it be education, Amtrak, the post office, Social Security, Medicare, ad nauseum. Nothing government has done has not been a Ponzi scheme dependent upon additional theft from taxpayers to keep going. The system is now broken. There is no one to blame for this other than government. Despite this obvious conclusion, government is still seen to be a savior by a large proportion of the country.

Sure, the retail "investors" are coming back into the "markets"... They are coming back in shifts.  And just so they know what to expect, here is what happened to Apple stock in the last second of regular trading today, courtesy of Nanex. Unlike traditional flash crashes where the trade is an HFT error, or a few shares traded through the entire bid or offer stack, in this case it looks like a very premeditated unloading of some 800K shares (some $350 million worth) of AAPL in the last second, with the full knowledge it was shake the market. Why anyone would want (or wait until the very last second) to do that, while covering the offsetting ES short in the pair trade, to ramp the market into the close, is anyone's guess.

After digesting the opinions of the shills, shysters and scam artists, I am ready to predict that I have no clue what will happen during 2013. The fog of uncertainty is engulfing the nation, making consumers hesitant to spend and businesses reluctant to hire or invest. Virtually all of the mainstream media, Wall Street banks and paid shill economists are in agreement that 2013 will see improvement in employment, housing, retail spending and, of course the only thing that matters to the ruling class, the stock market. Even among the alternative media, there seems to be a consensus that we will continue to muddle through and the day of reckoning is still a few years off. Those who are predicting improvements are either ignorant of history or are being paid to predict improvement, despite the overwhelming evidence of a worsening economic climate. The mainstream media pundits, fulfilling their assigned task of purveying feel good propaganda, use the 10% stock market gain in 2012 as proof of economic recovery. The facts prove otherwise... Every day more people are realizing the con-job being perpetuated by the owners of this country. Will the tipping point be reached in 2013? I don’t know. But the era of decisiveness and confrontation has arrived. The existing social order will be swept away. Are you prepared?

The day Lehman failed saw the launch of the most epic central bank intervention in history with the Fed guaranteeing and funding trillions worth of suddenly underwater capital. However, what Bernanke realized quickly, is that the "emergency, temporary" loans and backstops that made up the alphabet soup universe of rescue operations had one major flaw: they were "temporary" and "emergency", and as long as they remained it would be impossible to even attempt pretending that the economy was normalizing, and thus selling the illusion of recovery so needed for a "virtuous cycle" to reappear. Which is why on November 25, 2008, Bernanke announced something that he had only hinted at three months prior at that year's Jackson Hole conference: a plan to monetize $100 billion in GSE obligations and some $500 billion in Agency MBS "over several quarters." This was the beginning of what is now known as quantitative easing: a program which as we have shown bypasses the traditional fractional reserve banking monetary mechanism, and instead provides commercial banks with risk-asset buying power in the form of infinitely fungible reserves... So how does all this look on paper? We have compiled the data: of the 1519 total days since that fateful Tuesday in November 2008, the Fed has intervened in the stock market for a grand total of 1230 days, or a whopping 81% of the time!

Fresh off the printers today comes a new release from Haim Bodek titled The Problem of HFT.

While the furious defense of $500 the second AAPL crossed under the psychological barrier - the first time it did so in regular trading since February 15, 2012 - was promptly launched as otherwise the hedge fund community, which as we reported two weeks ago, and as Bloomberg caught on today, is more levered and long than at any moment in the past 9 years and is mostly invested in AAPL, we expect this intervention to eventually succumb to the inevitable French military campaign conclusion, as not even every HFT algo programmed to lift every offer under $500 can delay the inevitable arrival of a very sad cashflow reality. As for the Bank of Israel which is now about 5% underwater on its AAPL cost basis: don't worry - Ben will bail you out too.

It will not come as a surprise to too many Zero Hedge readers but we feel a big told-you-so dance coming on again.  Via BATS:

• *BATS SAYS 'SYSTEM ISSUE' CAUSED PRICING PROBLEMS OVER 4 YRS:WSJ
• BZX Exchange (10/24/08 - 01/04/13) Average Daily Incidents: 410.1 Total Incidents: 433,039

In simple terms BATS admits that the Reg NMS trading principle of NBBO (National Best Bid or Offer) has failed; meaning the core premise of market structure since 2005 has been massively abused by at least one and likely all exchanges. The bottom-line is that the primary and really only safeguard in the market when HFT was unleashed was never operational and the SEC has had i) no actual supervision over who or what was abusing the NBBO and ii) no way of keeping track of what really happens in the market.