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Broken Market Chronicles: Initial Forensic Visual Evidence Of This Morning's Algo Freak Out
Anyone who has had the displeasure of trading this market since the open will be well aware that the massive selling that started at 3:59:57 PM yesterday just as we showed, appears to have continued into today, after an algo, supposedly one impacting NYSE stocks this time, and proving that the entire market is a broken joke, not just Nasdaq and BATS, and one which is linked to Knight Capital, has continued this morning, sending countless stocks into the proverbial "batshit" formation, with moves of 10% higher and lower for no apparent reason. That's ok: the SEC and various other regulators are all over it, and will guarantee that the markets "are fixed." In other news, today we will report the latest massive outflow from domestic media funds. In the meantime, here are the first two picture of stocks getting pounded in super slo-mo courtesy of Nanex. Behold "perfectly normal" bids, offers and prints.
This is UNG: probably the most comprehensive way for retail investors to bet on nat gas. Not anymore: the ETF freaked out just as bad as hundreds of individual stocks.
Same for VPU: aka Vanguard Utilities. One can explain busted stock level action. But entire ETFs?
Summary: Perfectly Broken Market. And just at the right time we get this:
- LOUIS BACON TO GIVE BACK $2 BILLION FROM MAIN FUND TO INVESTORS
Only a market wide boycott of the busted garbage that passes for capital markets could possibly get some response from the idiots in "charge."
More pretty pictures of idiotic algo trades as we get them
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buy High and sell Low
"behold''. Nice
remain calm! all is well!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-24/sec-s-schapiro-warns-agency-employees-about-viewing-pornography-at-work.html
Louis Bacon says in a letter to his investors.
“Markets are increasingly distorted by central banks’ attempts to squeeze drops of growth from an over-indebted private sector across much of the developed world,” through such practices as bond purchases and super-low interest rates, Bacon wrote.
The U.S. markets are hindered by “a caustic political environment and an anti-business administration,” he said. U.S. banks have retreated from making markets in many securities because of the Dodd-Frank legislation, which limits them from trading for their own accounts. Bacon added that “in some Kafkaesque absurdity,” the rule is “named after the two high protectors from regulatory oversight of perhaps the most egregious of U.S. financial miscreants,Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”
Knight Capital...of course. The name did indeed ring a bell. These blokes must still be programming via punch cards...
"Knight, meanwhile, found itself dealing with such a high quantity of orders that one of its computers 'just blew up'..."
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/flash-crash-turmoil-saw-trading-b...
Free fcking money......unless they say when we're wrong its a do over when we're right no do over. I think they bust the illiquid ones like JWF but the thick ones like PEP stand.
One example: I bought the shit out of JWF at 24 then it went to 23 I bought the shit out of it more. At this point Im taking $15k in heat so I am assuming risk, yet they sometimes come along and bust these trades so I assume all this risk for nothing. I have a ton of massive positions my accounts are max leveraged but I am afraid to cover anything in case they bust. This marktet is so broken.
Only a market wide boycott of the busted garbage that passes for capital markets could possibly get some response from the idiots in "charge."
This qualifies as observation of the year.
Incontrovertible evidence that there are sharks in the water, yet you keep on swimming. That's what keeps the thing going.
Care to hazard a guess as to who routes a portion of their retail trades through Knight ?
Hint: it begins with an "F," ends in "y," and their logo is a green pyramid.
A Bizarro World indeed!!!
Bought to you by Fannie & Freddie, courtesy of the FHFA head DeMarco who allows Freedie to bet against refinancing and sticks it to the consumer with his own Proprietary Trading Desk, which creates Derivatives that profit only if homeowners are in high interest loans.
When Homeowners Lose, Freddie Mac Wins
If the homeowner is unable to refinance, the Freddie Mac portfolio managers win, Simon says. "And if the homeowner can refinance, they lose."
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/30/145995636/freddie-mac-betting-against-struggling-homeowners
How much more corruption can the taxpayers and markets take before we disengage and start burying cash in the back yard?
DIG IT! Shovel ready project!
Investment in Wall St is so 1990s. What's left is a totally rigged casino for crooks, sheep and skilled gamblers. Soon the gamblers will realise the casino is also on fire. Maybe the taxpayers will refuse to put this fire out?
Flight from USA markets is well underway, though some sheep are restrained by tax loss from cashing 401ks.
Popular flight from the banks and/or the dollar await the proper spark(s) in USA; but it is happening now in Euroland.
Putting out casino fires could trigger dollar demise.
Surely most here have gotten a portion out ahead of the rush?
What about the "Sports Illustrated, swimsuit issue?" That's not pr0n! :>D
How about giving out incentives for arresting fraudsters?
Natgas* should be called widowmaker*.
EDIT: Too bad even that name means about 90% of all market instruments these days, so I guess it's not specific enough.
Listen To The Stock Market Flash Crash As It Happened - Tick By Tick - Read The NANEX Final Report Contradicting The SEC
This is worth another listen. Sounds like Armageddon in the trading pit.
Wouldn't have wanted to be standing next to him without a face shield.
Wild! Thanks. Hysteria on the hoof.
Yet there is such ethereal beauty behind the chaos, it brings one to tears
If trading is your day job then I guess I understand why you continue. If you are a retail investor and still engaged then you deserve everything this manipulated abortion puts in your hand.
Stress test?
"Oh I'm Stressed!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUvzzEtNevY
The algos strike again and canabalize themself!
My recollection is that this sort of BS was happening all the time before the crunch last summer. I attributed it to beta testing the 'evil' algos. Yesterday sure looked like a probe of the market's resilience.
They have to keep it afloat until Draghi talks again, Bernank is a sideshow.
But there's a problem in testing 3 seconds before the "market closes": it does not stop at 4:00 by fiat *necessarily*. It can continue for a while... and these days a few seconds more *can* become a disaster.
Aren't they suppose to be taking all of their clothes off, too?
The matrix unfolding before our eyes boys and girls.
Machines break too.
There is no "market". Mark to fantasy forever!!!
Boss? Boss? uh Boss...
QUIET! I have SEC on the phone, what are you doing anyway!
Comforting on a day that we will get a Fed decision which is always crazy to begin with. Could get really interesting. I thought they were gonna have to shut her down there for a few minutes.
Complete shit-show.
Fucking useless regulators should all be fired or de-funded.
Losses. Massive losses are the only way to fix this POS market.
Pretty pictures.... (Homer voice)
OOOO Colours, mmmmmm
The 'Lawnmower Man' formation... (Prechter & Neely will be by shortly to put wave counts on all of that)...
Apparently I need some of those 'lawnmower man brain drugs' to figure these charts out...
I appreciate a LOT of the nanex stuff we get but this one is more like xanax - Can any one give me a better understanding of what is happening in these 20 secs (other than the standardx 'broke/rigged/fucked' market response)?? Would appreciate it...
Relax... It was all just the [channelingstocks.com] dweeb buying low & selling high off his tradestation at the driving range... & tomorrow, RobotTrader will tell you what you should have bought yesterday...
But its okay....we are the outsiders....the casino is rigged for the insiders...not us....they deserve to win....they built the computers to do so...I mean try to take a camera or an ear piece..or bring your won cards..or have your girlfriend stand behind your competitor in Las Vegas...see how fast they throw you out...but here in New York..cheating is good....its liquidity.....lol
I like get high then buy and sell. Zero Hedge should have a new t-shirt that uses one of these pretty pics on it.
Something like the following: One picture of a nice rolling sine wave with the caption: This is a free market. And then a picture from above with the caption: This is a kleptocracy controlled market shaken to death by algos.
The algos got bored of thier original BTFD programming, decided to have some fucking fun for once.
the thing is i cant even bring myself to be suprised, this kind of criminality is allowed, sec wont say shit.
BROKEN FUCKING BROKEN
Only a market wide boycott of the busted garbage that passes for capital markets could possibly get some response from the idiots in "charge."
Better to cash out than become JPMuggers next victim.
Too bad we don't have a transaction tax yet. THINK OF THE TAX REVENUE WE'D BE GENERATING RIGHT NOW.
The SEC is doing this for your own good. Looking out for the little guy. Be patient. It takes time to work out all those little details.
As usual, the following consumer discretionary oriented ETF's were completely and totally unfazed:
XRT
XLY
XHB
And, IYR actually crashed up on the open this morning!
LOL...
What...no mention of your old favorites from last Q CMG, SBUX, etc? Master of rear-view trading style.
FB fell below 21 .. where's Biderman?
lol? LOL is not a code!
it must totally suck to be you.
you can beat them if you buy physical gold and silver
WINNING!
Fsking #TIGERBLOOD baby!
Lol @" batshit formation" .
The SEC should have the preliminary report on what happened this morning by late 2015.
Overly optomistic.
We are revising our initial estimate this morning of 2015 to 2017.
Thank you for your patience, uh oh, never mind that on the computer screen.
With enough data points, couldn't we reverse engineer the algorithm and cause the whole thing to hit the downward breakers instantly with a little bit of cash?
1. you cannot bid in sub-penny increments
2. you cannot issue thousands of quotes per second
3. you cannot cancel your quotes before they exist, or sell before the quote appears
As a mere mortal, you cannot reproduce these effects. However, you can sign up to BATS and go download your own HFT software but remember, if you make it spike down instead of up, and it stays down, they call a mulligan.
All broken. Again.
Gold-$1598
S&P500-1328
Watching the market go full retard-PRICELESS
The markets are indeed broke, so where should we invest capital?
Convergence trade...
Still one ounce of gold for a hand-made suit and custom shoes?
Gold is $1,600 and a hand-made Anderson and Sheppard suit is now $4,521, not to mention custom shoes; your first pair from E. Vogel will cost you $1,375. Adding a belt, shirt, socks, and undies puts the fair-price of gold (historically) well over $6,000.
Reminds me of that scene in the movie 'The Game' where Michael Douglas is climing the fire escape to get away from the dogs & loses a single shoe... He says "There goes $1000"... The girl hes with says "Your shoes cost $1000"?... He says: "Well~That one there did"...
lol
Appears to be exactly what it is: a lottery machine with ping pong balls.
More like a lottery machine with weighted ping pong balls.
This is RAT in the grannary. Kill HFT way of trading or its going to kill the trading.
Already having this much trouble keeping it flat - and if i were a really bad person i would say AUD/USD, EUR/USD and GBP/USD are being traded by the same algo today.
So bullish on Knight Capital now!.......
As fucked up as it is people still continue to participate . What a joke.
ETFs are easier to break than single stocks, ETFs broke in much higher proportion on the flash crash day, along with less liquid stocks in the ETFs.
UNG, an ETF of a notoriously volatile commodity, has had a price swing today of $.75 or ~3.5%.
Exciting but perhaps not the best evidence for a broken market. WTF?
perhaps most profits are made in ETF and other derivative plays, while the zero sum game manipulations are executed in the underlying?
all day long they can pump or dump underlying with several percentages intraday, without cashing in a penny on these trades, but all along they set their targets in (leveraged) normal and inverse ETF's, and create moves that have almost no rationale but to move their derivatives in the money, then cash-in on them, and they can do this numerous times a day... they call it creating liquidity
meanwhile we rant at how little sense these sudden moves in equities, commodities and currencies make, often along linear support or resistance lines...
it's all smoke and mirrors, won't stop unless they ban these fake trading entities
why is there no hacker group to attack these algos?
I have a feeling they are the hackers. Very very wealthy hackers...
Broken! That's, a lot, of commas, in the first...,... sentence.
That would go great with some chianti and fava beans!
Good news everyone! SEC has an eyewitness to what happened with algo freakout....she says 'They looka lika MAN!' Eyewitness - Ms. Swan - YouTube
Comcast: Nice breakout to 52-week highs
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=cmcsa&in...
Must be those stellar ratings at CNBC
Somebody's picking on the Vanguard choir boys?
Something tells me Goldman had something to do with it. I believe they are VERY short this Market.
You know when they hit the ETF's it is meant to take down the whole Market.
Interesting because I am sure that almost all Shorts have covered because of the FED meeting and there would not be any support on the downside.
you may be right w_f_s; but it is pretty difficult to tell right now
the biggest "market" in play is the EU and altho a sell-off is over-due here, a "breakout rally" would make it moar&mo difficult for the germans to "throw cold water" on the econom, politically, since it would become more "expensive" in terms of "prices"
what do the banksters want? it looks like they may try for a rally here IN SPITE OF what may well be a "disappointment" regarding large-scale FED balance sheet munchies
i would consider this to be brianSack's first attempt at his his new jrWizardTM gaming console, btw
Seems to me that with the FED disappointing that the trade now will be to ramp the Markets to catch the Shorts off guard.
Everyone now will plow into Shorts and this will lead to a Short squeeze as all stops have been taken out.
LAST FRi (7/27)
when gold @ 1630 i asked: "HAS GOLD PEAKED" = yes it did!! now @ 1599 !!
see link below, page #2
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/what-does-gold-know-all-other-asset-classes-dont#comment-2656632
ADDITIONALLY, one of my fav SHOE SHINE BOYS: marc hulbert (cbs-mw "REPORTER") was super bullish yesterday when gold @ 1620..!!!!!
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-top-performers-are-going-for-the-gold-2012-08-01?link=MW_home_latest_news
he says: "follow the BEST performers, buy gold" = u go ahead and chase YOU STUPID PERFORMANCE CHASER!!!!!!
last fri me short spx @ 1386...been riding ever since..i'll cover @ sub 1300...wait for dead cat bounce and re-short and ride til sub 1100.
Oooooh, thats how a flash crash happens.
Nice catches.
I'm watching even more.
It's looking like the market wants to go red at least for a while before the PPT team takes over again. (as I write they've already started up from the days lows).
Hell it could be one of the PPT bots probing the market on the buy side with sells and then letting the remaining bots float the bid up again.
Whatever is going on the result is sell pressure on the market and revealing a good scope on bid to ask bid depths in terms of 'real' volume in places.
The sheer lack of obfuscation with this bot also says something.
End of Line
Earthquake!!!!1
Gotta love VPU. Traded 58,000 yesterday. Almost six million today. Only a computer could...
If the gaming industry was in charge of Wall Street, there would be broken legs and dead bodies in back alleys. The smartest people in the room would brag a lot less and CNBC would get only the same massive boobed girls.
Where I live the nat gas wholesalers have been buying up shale gas for $1.75. The best long term contract I can get is $5.65per mcf. The 12 month contract was $5.65 when nat gas traded near $4.
Good business if you can get in on it.
Gasoline went up $.48 since yesterday. $3.31 to $3.79. $3.79 gas at $90 oil, $3.79 gas when oil was at $110.
That makes sense right?
Time to cash out and play roulette. Safer.
WTF just happened to Silver. 0801 this morning? Where is the investigation ? Ohhh right, this is authorized fraud. Nothing to see here. Move along or else...
Markets to crash toot suite, methinks?
There's a ghost in the machine! Who ya gonna call?
Major Motoko Kusanagi, of course!
The evidence of one’s “lying eyes” is trumping the market fairy tale of recovery on QE fixes.
It’s not true the Fed has a handle on the crisis or its central planners wouldn’t be driving it deeper. The major problem they’ve got is UNEMPLOYMENT. And, in addition to the unemployed, the regime is giving massive amounts to food stamp recipients so they can buy groceries and keep the economy from tanking even further.
Food stamps (the modern day version of soup lines and selling apples on the street corner) and unemployment are the marks of a Depression. Is it getting better? NO. It’s getting worse. If you can’t find employment, you can’t eat, unless the government feeds you.
Economic Collapse has listed 65 economic statistics “that clearly show that we are in the midst of a long-term economic decline,” i.e. “economic collapse.” Among them:
“Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, fewer than 65 percent of all men in the United States have jobs.” And,
“The United States was once ranked #1 in the world in GDP per capita. Today we have slipped to #12.”
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/just-open-up-your-eyes-and-look-65-signs-that-the-economic-collapse-is-already-happening
Next thing you're gonna try and tell me olympic badmitton is fixed.
Just testing out the new algo software...nothing to see here.
Could it be that the house needs to bust a trade and yanks the quotes up or down so as to burry a previous mistake? That's what it looks like to me....
Remember this: Bernanke wants you to buy these garbage to support US economy. If there is any loss due to his advice, sue him!
Can you recommend an attorney who will take that case?
This should be interesting ...