HFT

Could the tide finally be turning on the high frequency churners-cum-manipulators? In an exclusive report, Reuters informs that "a big high-frequency
trading firm faces possible civil charges by regulators after its
computer ran amok and sparked a frenzied $1 surge in oil prices in
February, according to documents obtained by Reuters and sources
familiar with the continuing investigation." The firm in question is Infinium Capital Management, which confirmed that
it is the company at the center of a six-month probe by CME Group Inc
into why its brand new trading program malfunctioned and racked up a
million-dollar loss in about a second, just before markets closed on
February 3. And yes, once all is said and done, it will be precisely this kind of algos gone wild that are found to have caused the much more devastating move on May 6, as we have been claiming all alone, and which the HFT lobby has been fighting tooth and nail to bury under the rug.

Ever wonder why the SEC, FINRA and all other regulators actively continue to ignore the flagrant quote stuffing, frontrunning (yes, Flash trading is still a perfectly accepted practice) and all other destabilizing market activities facilitated and performed daily by High Frequency Trading (when comparable such actions result in jail sentences in Norway)? Hopefully the chart below will explain it...

In some very surprising news out Norway (thanks to all our Norwegian readers who alerted us about this), which once again condemns our own SEC for being a criminally negligent regulator, we learn that two Norwegians, Svend Egil Larsen and Peder Veiby, have been charged with market manipulation (a charge which carries up to 6 years of prison time if convicted), after succeeding to reverse engineer a stock trading algorithm used by broker Timber Hill, which is Interactive Brokers' key market maker. Allegedly, the two daytraders found a weakness in the Timber Hill algo on the Oslo Stock Exchange back in 2007 and 2008, and used it to outsmart the market maker and make a few hundred thousand NOKs in the process. The punchline is that the charge against the two is market manipulation with an intent of "using buy- and sell-orders that were not intended to be traded on, but to move the prices." The irony is that as we have demonstrated repeatedly by showing prima-facie evidence from Nanex, quote stuffing patterns by thousands of HFT algos running amok across various US exchanges, ATS and other trading venues, is precisely what happens every single day in the US - namely, algos which merely seek to push the bid or the offer in a given direction, with no intent of ever crossing a trade, all for the sole purpose of sending false indications of bulk orders coming. So when humans do it (and make peanuts compared to the billions the HFTs collect domestically), they end up going to jail; when our own system, which is geared to push stocks ever higher, does it - it is perfectly ok, and possibly even encouraged. After all, the HFTs provide liquidity, remember? Just ask Mary Schapiro. The sad conclusion is that those who wish to trade in markets that have not yet been overrun by SkyNet, or where regulation actually works, may be best served by trading on the Oslo stock exchange, and as far away from the US as possible. As for those who wish to remain in the US, here is what you can look forward for: one of Nanex' most recent crop circles, appropriately called "Robot Hunting."

We were pleasantly surprised yesterday when we saw news that Chuck Schumer was starting a campaign to aggressively rein in the HFT market members (which he correctly categorized as responsible for excessive volatility and the flash crash). Some reading between the lines, however, makes it appear that this action could be nothing but a red herring distraction, which attempts to actually promote the interests of the very same HFT lobby which the senator is presumably attempting to control.

Boom

HFT began with the observation that there is “structure” to the tick-by-tick movement of the markets, that as market participants – analog Hedge Funds, Real Money Investors, Brokerage Houses – made their trades, there were patterns to the price movements that could be predicted, and therefore profited from. From this position, it is a natural next step that as HFT trading bots become a large part of the transaction volume of the stock market (they are) that the algorithms that power these HFT trading bots should look to exploit the “structure” provided by other HFT trading bots. A logical next step, no doubt, but we are really at what I call “the end of the rationale road” of this stock market thing. We created this stock market thing so Montgomery Burns with capital, could get that capital to Transatlantic Zeppelin, which needed capital, in an efficient manner. Now, who knows why it exists. And concomitant with the rise HFT trading bots is an increasing correlation between the individual components of indexes[1] (e.g. all the stocks in the S&P are moving in lockstep). That great line that traders started in the 80?s “The ticker symbol is just a name on my screen, I don’t even know what the company does” has now become in the roaring 10?s “The name is just a line in the computer code, I don’t even know what the fucking name is anymore!?!”

Recently we posted a required reading analysis by Nanex in which the market trading analytics firm presented irrefutable evidence of quote stuffing by HFT algorithms in tens of stocks, in which thousands of cancelled quotes would reappear each second with a definitive periodicity and regularity, around the time of the May 6 flash crash. Aside from the fact that it is illegal to indicate a quote without a trade intent, this form of quote stuffing is in fact manipulative when conducted by HFT repeaters in specific "shapes" as it actually moves the NBBO actively higher or lower, in cases pushing the bid/offer range up to 10% higher without even one trade ever having occurred, simply by masking a big block order which other algos interpret as bid interest and pull all offers progressively or step function higher (or vice versa, although we have rarely if ever seen the walking down of a stock over the past 18 months). It is as if the HFT lobby has been given the green light by the powers that be that it is safe to activate merely the bid-size quote stuffing algorithms, and not worry: the fact that the market is so one sided in its quote stuffing patterns is sufficient reason to worry of a concerted effort to push stocks higher, initiated from the very top, and effected by not only the Primary Dealer community but by the end-market "liquidity providers." Today, courtesy of Nanex we demonstrate that this type of illegal stock manipulation continues rampant to this very day, and the SEC still to fails acknowledge that it is precisely the HFT market participants that persist in destabilizing stock prices, which have given up responding to fundamentals and merely move up or down based on quote stuffing interventions by those who plead innocence and claim to only be providing liquidity. Well take a look at the millions in fake, and thus illegal, bids demonstrated below and tell us just how any of this manipulation is "providing liquidity" - the second the patterns break, the algos responsible for the churn pattern disappear, thus eliminating numerous levels of so called bid liquidity below the NBBO: break enough patterns and you have another flash crash as the market once again goes bidless.So while the SEC continues to pander merely to the interests of the market manipulation lobby, and is now doing it in more style than ever by refusing to answer to FOIA requests going forward, here is Nanex with yet more evidence that we no longer have a market, but merely a daily recurring crime scene.

HFTs baby. HFTs. They just provide liquidity.

Zero Hedge's view on the systemic threat that HFT poses to markets, a topic beaten to death on the binary pages of this website, is gaining ever more supporters each day. The latest to lament the lack of imagination, creativity, and work ethic, and to caution against the greed, bandwagoning and groupthink of the binary churning crew know as the HFT lobby is Paul Wilmott, in yet another scathing critique of all that is rotten with modern market structure. One would hope after 10 years of increasingly more vocal complaints and a few hundred more flash crashes, even the incompetent illiterates at the SEC will finally pay attention and put an end to this travesty.

Another day, another binary HFT mad finger intervention making a mockery of the NBBO, and the general market. Earlier, following absolutely no news, Merrill Lynch Canada Inc (NYSE: HCH) which had closed at $115.93, decided to trade up 30% for no reason at the open, hitting a price as high as $144.99 after some computerized stock trading Frankenstein blew a fuse and ripped through every offer on its way $30 dollars higher. This continued for about 30 seconds between 9:34:14 and 9:34:49 when 1,700 shares went apeshit about 25% over the NBBO. Yet if this was an isolated incident it would be fine, but just over an hour later, the same algo went berserk again, going to town with the stock in the upper $130s, trading another 1,200 shares (see below). An embarrassed NYSE had to immediately come out and DK all the trades, providing no explanation for the DK'ing. After all, we all know that when it comes to HFT algos blowing up the market, be it 5/6, today, or last week when WaPo traded a few million percent higher for a second and tripped circuit breakers, nobody knows nothing. And as long as the HFT lobby continues to hire every single person from the SEC who believes they are owed a far greatersalary from the frontrunning lobby, the lack of knowledge will continue.

Even as the idiots at the SEC mope about cluelessly, confirming they deserve not one cent of taxpayer money to fund their massively overbloated budget, and should all be summarily fired to collect tarballs in the Gulf of Mexico (and soon Maine), our friends at Nanex have conducted an exhaustive analysis (must read for everybody concerned about market structure), in which they identify the various parties responsible for the market crash, and, drumroll please, High Frequency Trading stands at the pinnacle of culprits for the 1,000 point Dow drop. From their findings: "While analyzing HFT (High Frequency Trading) quote counts, we were
shocked to find cases where one exchange was sending an extremely high number
of quotes for one stock in a single second: as high as 5,000 quotes in 1
second! During May 6, there were hundreds of times that a single stock had over
1,000 quotes from one exchange in a single second. Even more disturbing, there
doesn't seem to be any economic justification for this. In many of the cases,
the bid/offer is well outside the National Best Bid/Offer (NBBO). We decided to
analyze a handful of these cases in detail and graphed the sequential
bid/offers to better understand them. What we discovered was a manipulative
device with destabilizing effect." In other words: enough with all the bullshit about HFT as a liquidity provider mechanism: in reality this is just a facade for the most insidious, computerized market manipulative device ever created. Nanex' conclusion: "What benefit could there be to whomever is generating these extremely high
quote rates? After thoughtful analysis, we can only think of one. Competition
between HFT systems today has reached the point where microseconds matter. Any
edge one has to process information faster than a competitor makes all the
difference in this game. If you could generate a large number of quotes that
your competitors have to process, but you can ignore since you generated them,
you gain valuable processing time. This is an extremely disturbing development,
because as more HFT systems start doing this, it is only a matter of time
before quote-stuffing shuts down the entire market from congestion. We think it
played an active role in the final drop on 5/6/2010, and urge everyone involved
to take a look at what is going on. Our recommendation for a simple 50ms quote
expiration rule would eliminate quote-stuffing and level the playing field
without impacting legitimate trading."

The kneejerk reaction to the completely unsurprising FOMC statement was down... Which is why the corresponding 12 handle move up in the ES is perfectly understandable... as long as one understands that our market is totally broken. 12 handles in 1 minute as the market went offerless! Have fun with that. As we noted earlier, ignore the record new home sales number: the algos will not let this market go until they melt it up to some gargantuan level. Good work computers - once again you have thrown out any marginal homo sapiens investors as anyone who doesn't think in binary has now lost all faith in stocks for good.

To say that the latest bout of regulatory capture-cum-bribery of SEC individuals by the HFT lobby is getting out of hand, would be like hoping to have your limit bid get hit in any stock without some computer subpennying you to death first. As the below post by Themis Trading indicates, soon there will be no SEC employees left for the HFT lobby left to poach, which is why each HFT firm is now designing new algorithms to predict whom their competitors will poach, and front run said poaching. This explains the installation of collocated "Uncle HFT Wants YOU (and pays big scalped bux)" boxes near the SEC headquarters in Washington. This will soon be followed by High Frequency churning of all the new SEC employees who are hired and fired a few million times each second.

The two stocks that have been a perennial churn magnet for every liquidity-rebate collecting, and predatory HFT algorithm in existence, and on occasion have amounted to 20% of total market volume, have been halted and are announcing their intention to delist from the NYSE after receiving a directive from the FHFA. Look for some really strange market behavior today as quants have to gut and completely recalibrate their signals. The FHFA noted that the decision to delist FNM and FRE is related to "stock exchange requirements of price levels, curing deficiency." How about the decision is based on the requirement to not trade companies which are so bankrupt not even the US government wants them on its balance sheet. And as we have reported previously, the FRBNY is perfectly ok with even taking bankrupt stocks as collateral in the discount window. Tells you something about the quality of the GSE "assets."

As Institutional Investor points out, "forget the Dow 30 - the 25 companies listed here are the favorites of high frequency traders in the US." In other words, here is where you get the best beta bang for your buck (what is this eahlfa?) as computer tries to outsmart computer in just these 25 shares, where the bulk of the market volume is focused. Can you spell churn? And, not surprisingly, this is where the bulk of the liquidity rebates provided by the exchanges if focused. Soon this list will be 5, and soon thereafter: SKN (DarkPool: SKYNET, share price: infinity).