HFT

Today, at 10:33:37 am, America's largest publicly traded company, Exxon Mobile (sorry, any surge in AAPL to the top market cap position in the US is truly the only realistic use of the word "transitory" in the past year) was halted after an errant trade printed outside of normal trading parameters and freaked out the artificial regulatory limiters. Naturally the trade was DKed, but for a few minutes one of the bellweather American stocks was out of commission due to the post-modern equivalent of a fat finger: an algo that was programmed to aggressively hit any bid, well below the NBBO. Luckily, this happened well after the rumor of a short selling ban was implanted in the traders' psyche, and markets were largley higher. Had XOM been halted as the S&P was down several percent, who knows what panic would have gripped the stock market forcing many to dump their holdings of viable stocks. And this will continue for as long as the SEC does not comprehend that the fact that US capital markets are broken is well and fully understood by most retail investors and which is why they have pulled over $160 billion from equity mutual funds since 2010.

And they thought they would get away with it... Over a year after HFT firms succeeded in crashing the stock market following an unprecedented spike in churn which eliminated all market liquidity in non-rebate providing stocks, followed by an across the board HFT STOP move which sent the Dow down 1000 points literally in seconds, the same HFT parasites that do nothing to provide liquidity but merely collect rebates in a low price, few high volume stocks as Zero Hedge has been warning since the summer of 2009, are finally getting the regulators to act and not to pull an Obama and blame it all on Waddell and Reed. Reuters reports: "The U.S. securities regulator has sent subpoenas to high-frequency trading firms in relation to last year's "flash crash" probe, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is also examining whether these firms further exacerbated the panic on May 6, 2010, when U.S. stock markets suffered a record fall within minutes, the Journal said. Some of the subpoenas have been sent since the start of the summer, the people told the Journal. The paper did not name the firms involved. [coughgetcocough] It is not known whether the subpoenas will result in any enforcement actions, the paper said. A subpoena does not necessarily reflect a suspicion of wrongdoing." Well, it is known that no enforcement actions will result if the SEC wants to retain its invisible low volume melt up bid which has pushed the market ever higher on 98% of the trading days in the past 2.5 years. If however, the SEC is willing to pull and S&P and finally do the right now, then all the 19 year olf math wizards who control 70% of the S&P churn should be worried. Very worried. As should all the momos whose only strategy for the past two years been BTFD.

For those who thought the crocodile algo or the fractal HFT patterns were crazy, you ain't seen nothing yet. Earlier today, Nanex caught arguably the most berserk HFT algorithm yet captured on film, or jpeg as the case may be, in the trading of Earthlink stock shortly after hours. What happened next is one for the ages... Because it certainly will not make it to the regulators. In essence, we had our first spotted appearance of the Whack-A-Mole algorithm, which allowed one, if one is fast enough, and incidentally one isn't, as all the bids would be cancelled at the same time as they were sent out, to make free money on a 10% trading spread between the bid and ask. Gone is any pretense of an NBBO, gone is any pretense of an orderly market: it is the wild, electronic, and nanosecond west out there.

Yes, SkyNet, we are watching you. And an odd correlation: every time a resistance level is breached, the computers go apeshit. Truly odd how this happens everytime computers try to outrun each other.

In another case of purely coincidental serendipity, three days ago Zero Hedge informed readers that the "NYSE Boerse [sic] has just announced its purchase of Kingsbury International Ltd., which surveys managers for the Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the company that hosts the Chicago PMI data, in order to bring PMI data direct to feed subscribers. Net result: expect even more market volatility at each PMI release, now that the market is not two but three-tiered, and consisting of regular HFTs, HFTs with access to the Deutsche Boerse feed, and everyone else." We concluded: "It is unclear if the ultra-speed, HFT friendly feed would be activated before its next release on June 30. That said, we will certainly coordinate with our friends at Nanex for any trading abnormalities, primarily in the critical ES futures, this Thursday at 9:42am, keeping a close eye on the tape, and indicating precisely when the tiered data release hits." Well, as promised here is the Nanex data. As expected, it's a stunner.

If the green line passes 200 for any extended period of time, we just may have conditions that are very to quite very reminiscent of the first flash crash. We will warn readers if we see any persistent quote stuffing/churning activity on the NYSE, whose poor Liquidity Replenishment Points just may not be able to take it.

As HFT algos continue to increasingly encroach on commodity trading, the most recent example of which was the berserk Nat Gas algo documented previously, the ICE has taken yet more steps to protect itself from "parasitic" algorithmic traders (a topic that has been beaten to death on Zero Hedge since the spring of 2009). From Reuters: "ICE Futures U.S. will increase its ability to adjust trade prices in softs futures, the latest in a series of changes it has made to deal with volatility in its coffee, cocoa, cotton and sugar markets. The amended rules will be effective July 1 and follow a series of changes to reduce unwarranted volatility in 2011, following the "flash crash" in equity markets in May 2010 that was exacerbated by high-frequency trading. In January, ICE delayed its attempt to mitigate cascading stops in the softs complex following feedback from market participants." Basically, the exchange has now decided to override the "market" at its sole discretion. ICE will be able to adjust trades made in coffee "C", cotton No. 2, cocoa, frozen concentrated orange juice and sugar No. 16 futures contracts. It will do this if "the exchange determines the original price of the trade does not represent the market value of the specific futures or options contract at the time of the trade," a notice states." Expect to see comparable approaches to ignoring what HFT quotes say as mini flash crashes become a now daily occurrence.

A few months ago we reported on Deutsche Boerse's Alpha Stream: a product suite especially designed to allow subscribers to get a millisecond advantage when market moving economic data is reported, which would then set HFT algos off the races, with the expectation that those paying a pretty penny for such access could scalp a few nickels from those without this critical (in our day and age of collocated needs) data feed. As a reminder, among the key benefits to customers, Deustche Boerse, now the owner of NYSE Euronext were that i) Data is sent directly by our journalists from government lock-ups; ii) Designed for easy direct integration into trading algorithms; iii) Global co-location and other connectivity options iv) AlphaFlash uses the high speed global network of Deutsche Börse and was designed by technology experts from the world of low latency trading. And while Euronext has had about 3 market halts in Europe in the past week, that appears to be irrelevant: with reverse merger listing fees now a thing of the past, the Deustche Borse has to continue raking in high margin HFT clients with the promise of some free latency arbitrage. Therefore, in order to make its product offering that much more appealing to 19 year old Ph.D.'s everywhere, NYSE Boerse has just announced its purchase of Kingsbury International Ltd., which surveys managers for the Chicago Business Barometer, also known as the company that hosts the Chicago PMI data, in order to bring PMI data direct to feed subscribers. Net result: expect even more market volatility at each PMI release, now that the market is not two but three-tiered, and consisting of regular HFTs, HFTs with access to the Deutsche Boerse feed, and everyone else. Does this make capital markets any more efficient? Hell no. Does it benefit the willing participants in a rigged casino who are about to purchase a faster reaction time for one of the blackjack tables? But of course.

While many have speculated that the May 6 flash crash was a combination of High Frequency Trading (primarily), quote stuffing, ETF participation, and overall liquidity reduction, few, and certainly not the SEC, have been able to pinpoint the participation of HFT in disruptive ETF movements. Indeed, HFTs have been isolated in individuals stocks (best seen in the infamous "crop circles" images from last summer here and here) and specific futures contracts (most recently the NG NYMEX contract which experienced a truly bizarre algo driven sine wave pattern before flash crashing with no fundamental input) but rarely in actual ETFs. Perhaps this has been due to the relatively high volume of trades in some of the most popular ETFs such as the SPY, where the impact of one single algo would rapidly get lost in the noise. Well, a few days ago, Nanex once again was the first to catch the NatGas "sine wave" in action in what is possibly the most actively traded product in the stock market: the SPY or Spider ETF. Today, Nanex once again brings something very jarring to popular attention by focusing not on the most trafficked "synthetic CDOs" but on numerous ETFs that have not been front and center in the public's eye, yet which could serve as a great practice springboard to total market manipulation via HFT strategies - strategies that if taken beyond their reasonable limit, could crash the overall market very much how the NatGas algo crashed the price of gas by 8% in seconds. Presenting the RETF algo....whose purpose is currently unknown, but whose presence in the market should be known by everyone who trades stocks.

It doesn't get any more blatant than this. Once again, courtesy of Nanex we present to our incompetent regulators prima facie evidence of what is outright tape painting via what is an apparent HFT algo trying either to front run an order, to test for the presence of other predatory algos, and in general to take advantage of Reg NMS only protecting displayed liquidity over non-displayed (a topic we discussed two years ago). In the example below, which shows unique trades in the stock of XEL.PR.G, in the span of 30 seconds, 430 shares are bought up on the way up from $90.5 to $102.25, and then sold off once again in another 10 seconds, hitting all bids as soon as they appeared. Now this is not some HFT-darling which trades millions of shares per day (and sees blasts of tens of millions of quote stuffing packets in hours) and thus will likely be ignored by the general population... until it does hit some stock that people do care about. Naturally the implication is that, as Nanex points out, if all stocks traded/quoted at this frequency, even the the SEC could figure this out in a few weeks, after assembling a multi-discipilanary team of course. Is it any wonder that virtually nobody trades on open exchanges anymore (yes, most trading, or what's left of it has shifted to Sigma X and other dark pools) where the only survival tactic for such legacy monsters as the NYSE and Nasdaq is to laterally buy up as many of their peers as they can now that organic growth no longer exists: gotta love a world in which there are 83 different ATS venues, all of which permit some permutation of millions of stock manipulation strategies.

Earlier this week Citi underwent a reverse 10 for 1 stock split to create the perception that the world's worst financial company is not a pennystock. So far it has failed miserably, with Citi stock dropping in nearly a flatline since the event. But the biggest casualty by far are the rebate collecting robots who would ping pong the stock among each other with no intention of ever holding, merely creating the impression of a deep and liquid market (repeat after us: volume is not liquidity, and HFT provides volume not liquidity). With the price increasing tenfold from before, it was expected that broad trading in the name would drop but a substantial margin. Sure enough, Nanex has helped us by preparing the relevant charts indicating the dramatic change in trading and quoting pre and post the change.

While the wacky desperation antics of America's nationalized bank (that would be Citigroup for the cheap seats) enter the surreal zone, after the bank just announced a 1 for 10 reserve stock split (finally returning the stock price to Al Waleed's cost basis, if not entrance market cap) and a 1 cent dividend (which effectively means the Fed can now exit the prop each failing bank game... but won't), the bigger question is what happens to the momentum algos that traditionally traded 500 million shares of Citi stock, providing a supporting base for the market courtesy of massive momentum surges that provided a buying feedback loop mechanism driven out of pure churn volume. Those days are now over, as the volume will plunge pro rata from half a billion to a measly 50 million shares. Furthermore, with algos receiving liquidity rebates on a volume basis, it is conceivable that the biggest piggy bank to the 3 man Ph.D. HFT operations is about to break, as exchanges cut their rebate payouts by 90%. And with the stock market these days being far more a function of volume churn than technicals or, heaven forbid, fundamentals, what happens with the natural HFT support to the market is anyone's guess. One simple assumption: the next time the S&P does a May 6, or a USDJPY flash crash, the liquidity providers will pull out that much faster, leading to a massive freefall without any of the foreplay.

As everyone knows all too well by now, High Frequency Trading is arguably among the key culprits for all that is wrong with our broken equity market, culminating naturally with the events of May 6, 2010. Therefore, it is not surprising that regulators in Europe, which now has a much more fair and efficient overall capital market than the US, "plan next year to introduce new rules to restrict the trading activities of these traders -- tech-savvy hedge funds that generate huge volumes of orders -- to prevent a repeat of last year's U.S. "flash crash"." However, since HFT is nothing but a cheap way to promote vapor-volume momentum, while frontrunning everyone in the process, it is only natural that Europe's banks would come out kicking and screaming in its defense: "Europe's top banks are warning global regulators against curbs on high-frequency trading firms (HFTs), insisting that so-called "market bandits" are vital for efficient markets...A panel of managing directors from major European investment banks told the Reuters Future Face of Finance  Summit on Wednesday that punishing these traders was risky because they were a key source of liquidity that benefits all trading firms." Ah, "providing liquidity" - that universal euphemism for frontrunning, quote stuffing, inducing flash crashes and for pretty much every possible illegal activity, except for... providing liquidity. As for the fact that "market bandits" are "vital for efficient markets"... we'll just leave that one alone.

It was less than three short days ago that we wrote about what is poised to be an imminent surge in corn prices. To wit, we said: "If revised Chinese import estimates by the US Grain Council are even
remotely correct, look for corn prices of $6.80 a bushel at last check
to jump by at least 15% in a very short amount of time. As the FT reports, "Corn prices – and with them, the price of meat – are set to explode if the latest import estimates from China are correct. The US Grain Council, the industry body, said late on Thursday
that it has received information pointing to Chinese imports as high as
9m tonnes in 2011-12, up from 1.3m in 2010-11." Why is this a
concern? Because "the US Department of Agriculture, which compiles
benchmark estimates of supply, demand and stocks, forecast Chinese imports at just 1m tonnes in 2011-12." In other words, the whole forecast supply-demand equilibrium is about to be torn to shreds." And with the market being perfectly efficient, and not dominated by dumb robotic HFT trading at all, it has taken the "market makers-cum-liquidity providers-cum-no volume meltup facilitators" just over 48 hours to understand what this means. And what it means practically is another limit up open in the grain.

Today's flash crash du jour comes to you courtesy of Magnum Hunter Corporation (MHR), which in the span of a few tick lost half its $500 million market cap. Unlike most other such HFT triggered events, there was actionable news, after the company announced it would acquire NuLoch Resources, yet still the fact that a selling algo can take out virtually the entire orderbook half way down to zero would once be considered at least modestly surprising. Not so much anymore.