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Knight Considering Bankruptcy, Looking At 363 Asset Sale
- VIRTU OUT OF BIDDING FOR KNIGHT CAPITAL
- KNIGHT’S JOYCE CONSIDERING BANKRUPTCY REORGANIZATION
- KNIGHT LOOKING AT ‘363’ REORGANIZATION TO SELL ASSETS
- KNIGHT LOOKING TO EMERGE AS VIABLE COMPANY
363 Asset sale? This is what we said earlier when we reported on the rumors of a sale to Virtu: "Will it happen? Maybe. Although we doubt it - why pay for equity value when one can pick up the functioning assets in a Chapter 363 asset sale which also sticks the creditors with all the crappy assets?" Sure enough. Sadly, what this means for the company 1,500 employees is that about 80% them will be out of a job due to an algo gone wild. And to then we have been warning about the impact of HFT for the past 3 years.
Perhaps now that people's livelihoods are about to destroyed even the porn-addicts at the SEC will finally take this matter seriously.
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giddy up - http://www.hedgeaccording.ly/p/babe-of-day.html
I'm supposed to feel sorry for the people who worked at Knight? Reaaaally?
The bigger problem is the billions places like these have stolen over the years.
No more multi-million dollar Christmas bonus? No more drinking champagne toasts from a balconey while laughing at the Occupy protestors? What is the world coming to?
They waited until after the market close to report this? .... huh ... wonder why they did that .... ;)
surely you are aware that the large banks are behind this also, eventually they will control the algo trading as well, partly by "attritioning" the smaller players.
Can't they just do some repo 105's?
At BanKnightofAmeriCountryWideMerriLynch we offer a broad portfolio of campaign finance solutions...
Nothing like seeing money changers go bk.....have a good weekend everyone
i heard KFC is hiring....the Bollinger's on me.
fried chicken is depression proof business world wide.
Colonel Cluck was a freaking genius.
they can fry it and serve it to you cheaper than you what raw chicken costs at the market.
KFC first fast food in China. even communists can't resist.
On last supper, Jesus had fried chicken.
...and Knight likely laments that 'if only liabilities were as easy to vaporize as assets, nowadays'...
HFT is the only game they got left.
Sucks to be them, because they'll have to take money from each other now.
Where is dic_in_the_box telling us how much money he made off Knight yesterday?
DaddyO
Most individual investors have quit the rigged casino of Wall Street/3 card Monti as in Mario Monti.
"surely you are aware that the large banks are behind this also, eventually they will control the algo trading as well, partly by "attritioning" the smaller players"
"suppose they threw a market..........and nobody came" ?
In a way, I enjoy this more than if the SEC or CFTC had been caught actually doing their (assumed) jobs.
I like the idea of these S.O.B.s taking themselves down in the age old ways of the worst of the human race...
through arrogance, hubris, short-sightedness and GREED
Whores and hookers seeing revenue desimated
Price of pussy going down. So to speak
Is there a place where all of this financial shenanigans are being recorded?
AIG
Lehman repo 105
fannie mae/freedie mac nationalization
bank bailouts
Madoff ponzi
Sanford ponzi
Facebook IPO
BATS IPO
Flash Crashes
MF Global missing customer cash
Barclay, bank of england led Libor fixing
Knight Capital
PFG<>Best
ZH?
R. Allen Stanford
"Investors hold $375 million of Knight convertible notes and can demand repayment if there’s a “fundamental change,” including a sale, according to a 10-K filing. The biggest owners of the notes are Goldman Sachs, Oaktree Capital Management, Invesco Ltd. and Citadel Advisors LLC, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The bonds lost 16.125 cents to 67 cents on the dollar, sending the yield up to 20 percent."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-02/knight-said-to-open-books-to-su...
Hopefully some sort of equilibrium where true labor is valued accordingly and fictional fractional rehypothicated horseshit reverts to the true mean.
Push on my aggregrate demand string bankster bitchez.
I guess we should start worshipping the machines then if labor is valued accordingly...
All hail the co-located NYSE servers. All hail the algos. All hail Benny's Printing Press.
All Halle Berry!
Speaking of bankrupt, so is the story we're being fed about the Aurora shooting:
http://americankabuki.blogspot.com/2012/07/these-arent-same-man.html
Well he was arrested in Occupy San Diego right? Then they should have fingerprints. Sorry, but I think it's the same guy from the photos anyway.
I thought the same thing when I saw the pics a week ago. Oh well.
This is good for us westerners who work in IT. The latest software that caused this debacle was operated by Indian 'experts' that took over the code base.
So kcg saved a couple of hundred grand on replacing western coders with Indian 'experts' and this cost them the company :)
I do not understand how this expert system could invert the decisions, there could be an super easy explanation for this... And if any of you Indians read this please tell me if it was a back chaining check that took frame command?
Or did you invert a variable ?
Thanks
H1B is not just for IT anymore and those indians have been in US for a decade now, so they got greencards. and that's when they get laid off.
It looks like they stopped hiring even H1Bs starting 2008.
However, the salaries aren't too bad.
Director, Quantitative Trading $160,000 2007-05-08
VICE PRESIDENT, QUANTITATIVE STRATEGIST $150,000 2008-01-17
VICE PRESIDENT, PROGRAMMER/ANALYST $140,000 2009-12-10
ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT, QUANTITATIVE ANALYST $140,000 2008-09-26
Manager, Software Research and Development $150,000 2007-06-26
I am sorry but those salaries are shit! A admin dude at a bank gets 125.000... For a real expert in expert systems you get a consultant that will take home at least 1,000,000 for a 6-9 month project.
I did 250,000 a year in my youth as a AVP... Caring for trading infrastructure.
If you read this and work for less than 200k in an trading environment you are a idiot and a fool!
figures dont' include bonus
1099s get market rate which is typically x2~3 salary to cover bennies and taxes and sales (self employment TAX for being too good to work for corp)
well if you are a programmer in a trading environment, what can I say..... traders get the big pay in trading environment.
That's why Aleynikov was paid $400K per year by Goldman Sachs and still wanted out. (offered 1.2M)
Well Aleynikov is a guy who is a real expert. Don't know him and have never met him.. But 400k for the work he did is ridiculous (and he realized that after some time) maybe he did not believe it could be done... I do not know.
I would have asked for 36,000,000 a year if I had the skills and opportunities he had.
But you are right the traders make the big money, and that is fine considering their faily short careers. But it is important to realize the value of your own work whatever you do. And if you build a kick ass expert system that outperforms others you do not settle for crumbs.
For the next gen systems coming online the price tag is closer to a quarter billion, therefore if you are great do not settle for less than millions.
Two systems are never identical, ask altavista or bing after google showed how it is done.
Those employees were never working anyway. Digging a ditch is working. They were dusting off their monitors to look at the pretty colors.
Fuck Knight Trading. They have frontrun my orders so many times, it ain't even funny.
Should be an interesting scene in the Hamptons this weekend. Especially after the pink slips are given tomorrow afternoon.
Not saying the specialist model didn't have its flaws that are natural with greed and front running being one of them, but you never saw anyone of them blow up as spectacularly as this has.
They're not employees, they are PARASITES! Fumigate them.
Bah, hope you don't direct that to those lower level office people like janitors and secretaries who get less than the scraps.
KCG
-4.36 (-62.82%)
After Hours: 2.17 -0.41 (-15.89%)
one short trader is getting lucky tonight!
By "one short trader", do you mean (i) not you, (ii) an insider, or both?
Buy rating at $16
Where is that guy who claimed he bought 100K shares at 2.33 earlier today?
I'll bet he's crapping his pants now.
Correction, it's called Making a Morgan.
short covering is a buy
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/dark-pool-knight-falls#comment-2668985
And Slaughterer @ $2.30
2673536
"We bought 100,000 shares of KCG at $2.30."
The Tyler's need to post the biggest holders of this dogshit stock. My guess is Whitney Tilson or whatever his name is owns it. Probably many hedge fund schmucks too.
Did someone notice that the stockprice already went south the day of the glitch, hours before that glitch occured?
Someone became rich by suicide-attack?
Where is JPM in all of this?
Got to wonder if those segregated accounts at Knight are fully funded.
So... who's gonna get those customer accounts this time around?
What customer accounts?
National Bank of Greece is still around looking for customer deposits.
Oh, that's the pile of millipennies over there.
If the squid is in on the sale, I'll shit myself.
Why would you assume less?
I've been joking all day that it's them and the Morgue. If it turns out that way, it might just be too much for me.
"Fredo, I know it was you. You broke my heart. YOU BROKE MY HEART !"
It was probably one of their computer guys doing the coding-gone-wild. Next we find out GS was short Knight.
... while telling their muppets -- I mean "clients" -- that they have a 'strong buy' on Knight ...
No shorts available for my tries today. Little people can't naked short. GS WAS I am sure
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1h7OXlPeMQI
You blinked and you missed this story. But then again, the story keep repeating itself over and over again.
computers win!
algo's are people too...
Corporations are people you dumb ass.. Sheesh. /sarc
The pace seems to be quickening
That's what happens when your business relies on fucking algos. Haven't they seen Terminator 3?
That what happens when your business relies on algos written by a third party.
seems like a hunter/killer algo lurking out there... who gets it next?
Its one thing to rely on algos, but to rely on one written by a third party? nuts. How many firms are running third party bots, how will they be sure theirs did not come with the `on a certain date, you lift the offer and hit the bid` feature? Perhaps these appalling rebate collecting scams will start to be swiched off at last - we can but hope.
Reminds me of the great white sharks fleeing when one of them gets killed by a pack of killer whales...
In regard to your answer concerning the outcome of a Great White versus Killer Whale battle, all known verifiable evidence supports the Killer Whale as the winner in almost all circumstances. In her book, The Devil's Teeth Susan Casey details the several weeks she spent on the Farallone Islands with Great White Shark researchers Peter Pyle and Scot Anderson. Pyle and Anderson have studied the predatory habits of great white sharks for over 15 years with the Farallone White Shark Project. A documentary on their work was released by the BBC and titled the Great White Shark. I own it and it's superb. They report that when the Killer Whales show up at the Farallones and kill one of the great white sharks, all of the other white sharks leave the area at high speed. How the Great Whites know when the killer whales make a kill is unknown. They also report that Killer Whales actively hunt great whites and they know exactly how to capture and kill them. On page 184 of the hard cover edition of The Devil's Teeth they report that on 10/4/1997 two maurauding Orcas (Killer Whales) attacked and killed a white shark by flipping the shark on its back and holding it until it drowned. Then they ate him in front of a boatload of tourists. Immediately after the kill all of the great white sharks at the Farallones vanished. It happened again on 11/19/2000. But this time many of the white sharks were tagged with satellite tracking devices. Immediately after the attack the great whites left the islands for several days until the Orcas left. When push comes to shove, it seems that, at least in these instances, it's no contest; brains, blubber and size over the mean teeth machine.
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Wild-Animals-705/f/Great-White-Sharks-Killer.htm
How many sharks have to get killed before they all leave?
So JAWS was crap? They could have just dropped a couple Orca's in the water and had a beer and a smoke. Sheesh what a joy killer you are.
Reminds me of hippos in Africa. They just like to be left alone but when other animals f*** with hippos - they pay for it. Orcas are tough and smart mo fo's.
Calamari, Red or White.......................
Red please, to match the Muppets tape color for the day...
i like that "considering" .. didnt mother fucker global "consider" being in business the next day?
SEC is just the clean-up crew.
"Perhaps now that people's livelihoods are about to destroyed even the porn-addicts at the SEC will finally take this matter seriously."
Nah. Not a chance. Not until THEIR employment is at risk.
PAGING BART CHILTON!
How's that silver "investigation" coming along anyway (4 years)? Tin Hat my ass...the whole shithouse is going up in flames.
See my reply below, saw the same issue you did. Only difference is I don't think anything can be done about it.
It's not just the SEC... It's also the Pentagon:
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/consumer-security/porn-site-viruses-t...
Actually, the SEC porn watching habits have slid over to the Missle Defense Agency like Ebola in Uganda.
im sure Maria B was chiming that all is good cause "we finished off the lows"
Well thank God for that!
I think she says that every time she gets off her knees from giving a BJ.
If that's the case I guess she's graduated from 'money ho' to full on shiksa cum dumpster...I wonder how many "Dirty Gersteins" she gets in a day?
Congrats Maria B. I bet your Daddy's proud.
I think we need to redefine the term "assets." The difference between what the world's debt is collateralized with and the sum total of things that are actually valuable is a number that has about nine commas...
Fat hft finger in your ....
Nothing will come of this. As usual.
I wonder how The Axe is feeing after this post... 2673538 ? Or sessinpo after this post 2673688 ?
Probably the same way after I drink too many Duff beers.
How should I feel? I don't post to feel. My post was in reply to The Axe who made the comment "group think" My post was to suggest that that his thought was also group think, the thought that buying the dip and that Wall Street and Nite Partners would save the day, so he bought 30,000 shares.
If I were an asshole, which I am, I could say I feel vindicated. But I really hate to see others lose money in this BS world. They should know better. So how do you feel? Maybe I could say another decent call on my part but I didn't really call anything. It was really a post on fallacy of thought. But I guess I am glad I never bought their stock which isn't really glad because its like a tree falling in the forest when I'm not around. I never heard it and it didn't effect me.
Let me know if that fallen tree catches fire though, a forest fire effects many.
My apologies. I read that as supporting The Axe's assertion that Tyler didn't know what he is talking about. I was wrong and I apologize.
No problem and no apologies needed. Actually I thought you were suggesting I rub in toward Axle which isn't worth my time.
I have made some calls. Most fairly good. Others, I've had my ass handed to me.
Anyway, after the shannigans with MFG and PFG, why would any sane person buy into Knight? Outside of my 401k, which I consider throw away money and I hardly pay attention to, I am very suspect and cautious with any account. Let me make this clear for everyone, bullish or bearish.
"If a financial firm (brokerage, insurance, banking, etc) gets into financial trouble, your supposed segreggated account is in trouble. Firms in trouble almost automatically suspend withdrawals and closing of accounts. The rule of law has been destroyed in this country. It probably goes back further but the most prominent incident was the GM bailout where bond holders got screwed. Nothing is sacred anymore, no law or contract. This is part of the downfall of our society, a corrupt state of both bankers and politicians." Sessinpo
For this very reason, you will find me posting political crap that is mostly against liberalism and for conservatism or modern day libertarianism and I know it pisses some off. But I really don't care. I don't spend to much time here but it is one of the few sites I frequent because I do think TD brings news stories of value not being covered by the MSM. Keep an eye out, I'll make a few calls here and there. I'm flat right now after predicting the upside gap filling on the NYSE just before it happened.
YOU MEAN THE POWERS THAT BE HAVN'T BEEN LISTENING? REALLY? THE PHUCKTARDS LIKE TO WATCH DO THEY? HOW PHUCKING ORIGINAL! Only a WILLFUL idiot couldn't see this coming. I mean "WHEN IT COMES TO MONEY PEOPLE PREFER THE TRUTH?" That's the FIRST thing the puckers kill. Shall we throw the baby out with the bath water then? I say GO FOR IT.
Civilizations are rarely able to grasp the indigenious practices which bring about a societal decline.
there's always a silver lining ... for instance, I bet all those employees were able to get into the FB IPO for the sweet price of 39 bucks ....
"We regret to inform you that we have to let you go due to a computer error."
- Human Resources
...
...
...
Worst. Bankruptcy. Ever.
"Your job was just a volatile variable in our algos anyway."
HR
im amazed how stupid people are, algo's have no capacity for independant thought, people entrust a machine to be in a market, which cant think for itself, how else was this ever gonna end? all it gets is bid/ask it doesnt understand that its a bit irrational to buy 8*100 shares a second how could it? yet people think its fine to let that loose on the market..
heres the kicker, if that happened on accident, imagine all the times a hft algo has been let loose to deliberately bring a stock price down, during periods of instability ie 2008..
Let them fall....one by one
Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past.” “He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past." —George Orwell
This whole thing just stinks....
Facts
Questions
Did someone hack Knight's code?
no...
Nope
Some programmer probably typed in a minus sign where a plus sign was actually needed.
Wadell and Reed, those fat fingered fuckers!
you think they work their code while trading? no way
much more to this story... agreed... money is getting vaporized left and right now. no new QE to feed the beast? the beast is very hungry...
All in a week with no central bank printing.
It's too easy.
Twist. ZIRP all over the place. Market rates killing others. It's happening despite..
I remember the e-mini dump tyler pointed out the night before. It was like a) someone was testing it b) it got activated before the market opened, and someone let it off early by accident.
were only NYSE stocks affected?
How do we know it was an "algo fuckup"? Because Knight's top guy said so? Supposing it was a legitimate trade to front-run the Fed's non-decision on Wednesday. And supposing someone (like the Fed's trading desk or Goldman's/JP Morgan's HFT computers) immediately spotted the trade and countered it...very successfully. Sure looked that way to me as I watched the after-hour's action. Knight was neutered.
by blasting Radioshack's stock up fifty cents???
I don't think so. Unless radioshack is about to release anti-gravity boots.
Post of the day.
This was no algo glitch Tylers, wake the fuck up.
Follow the money to get your answers.
Dont forget last year--wether its KGC or not--they are all the same connected matrix.
http://www.businessinsider.com/knight-capital-fat-finger-etf-incident-2012-8#ixzz22PfLk6R3
http://youtu.be/KULM72PoaOo its all safe seg funds; ANYBODY UP FOR ANOTHER CONGRESS HEARING???
There will be a damn long line soon for the Congress hearings...
http://www.facebook.com/VotingIsDead
This doesn't make any sense to me. How could knight allow this shitty algo onto the floor to begin with? I mean it litterally buys the offer and sells the bid.
In the past, I've worked at firms with algos. When one of them goes haywire, they cut it immediately. And any code would be looked over by multiple people before putting it out on an exchange. This is just too basic of a fuck up for it to not be a part of something larger. Knight cannot possible be that stupid.
Did they get hacked? Was it an inside job? Where they trying to blow out instead of facing something worse?
It doesn't add up to me.
the last option seems most fitting, if your accounts are all fcked up, then an algo goes wild causing untold losses, then the holes in your books are easily plugged, weird thing is how much bigger the losses are than the estimated losses.
It's just another fraud scheme. The participants are safe, so don't worry.
"Were they trying to blow out instead of facing something worse?"
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.
Yep... looking at their balance sheet, this should be incredibly painful, but not company-terminating to them, yet in <24 hours they're talking about throwing in the towel.
This is the bank robbers setting the getaway car on fire to burn the evidence.
This is such a good point. The numbers don't add up. The "actual" losses are so much higher than the estimated loses.
This is a smokescreen.
100 share trades by the hundreds, and faster than you can blink an eye. Why? Probably cuz sometimes crime does pay. Didn't this time.
Malicious code that did the reverse of what it should do? A Goldman/JP Morgue stuxent? When you have high frequency trading - things can go bad really fast.
Buffett,Soros, Rahm, O, Goldman, the Morgue and their cronies took a lot of competitors out in 2008 including McLame during that summer. Lehman and Bear never knew what hit them.
One-zero-zero, one-zero-zero, one S-O-S.
Replays each of the days, a hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays to the mother of all Machines...
(The Body Electric, N. Peart)
Maybe the bot went nuts when HR told him that his new health care plan -with a 50 dollar co-pay -was the Geek Squad?
I'm betting a programmer put a conditional branch in the ALGO that routinely checked for him on the payroll by employee number. When his employee number showed he was no longer working with? the the firm, this alternate "self destruct" execution branch took over. He purchased significant, market-contrary positions in all the affected stocks, and is now sitting pretty in his private jet on the way to Switzerland
even if it's not true, I'm making the movie
That's about as good a theory as any other I've seen.
Try this variation: A thrid party wrote this app for Knight, who either later stiffed them on the fee or didn't renew the "support contract". So some server phones home as usual, this time gets the command to kill, and unwinds itself. Since Knight never had access to the source code and probably doesn't even do their own IT (and might not host the server in the first place) it takes them 30 minutes to notice there was a problem, pinpoint the problem, and turn off the machine.
I'll settle for 10% of the screenplay royalties.
Outsourcing is good for the bottom line.
I know the company getting the work likes it.
I had a friend who worked at the JP Morgue. The Indians used to FU the code overnight in Mumbai/Bombay whatever. They would call his home at 3 am so he could fix their FU and curried spaghetti code. He quit are a short stint.
Just like ET, Knight's software phoned home, which is probably 200 West Street in Manhattan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/200_West_Street
If it was a "hack job" the NYSE would have cancelled all the trades.
They would never admit to their computers being hacked and being able to cause this.
I always thought market making was computer related, not computer controlled!
They clearly couldn't turn it off because of the volume and speed. nobody knew who was doing it. there were many other traders (humans) also putting in bids and sells as they reacted to the weird swings. There is no way they can cancel the trade, knight is obviously going to eat it. Whoever planned this probably knew that. May have set up their own algos to disguise massive purchases well before this timebomb went off, and already cashed out...
I disagree.
If you run a firm that is processing millions in trades, you better have your infrastructure NAILED DOWN to the last server RACK.
The moment the red phone rings, IT should be able to tell you the switch, port, ip address of the offending box - and by the way, we killed the process sir, all is well - post-mortem in 30 minutes.
That is the way it is supposed to be done, not fiddling around like a bunch of keystone cops trying to pile into a wagon.
That's the way it's supposed to be done. However, when was the last time you worked with a company that was that pedantic about their IT infrastructure? Most IT managers don't give a crap about that kind of stuff.
And they don't know or want to know about their infrastructure. I really do wonder what kind of test environment was used. It seems like the first thing cut from an IT budget is testing.
I had a friend who worked at AIG, Lehman, Merrill/BAC and maybe Bear plus a few others. He said the IT and legacy code was pretty bad. EVerything in NYC in these grunt areas is covering each others ass.
Knight was probably better because this stuff was mission critical. The question is always - who benefits. The software had a worm or something that benefited a competitor. Who has Russian contract programmers thrown in jail by Uncle Sam where they are pretty much dumped there with no bail? The vampire squid?
.
Where the Fuck is Jon Corzine?
Good book title, there Gypsy.
Who is John Galt?
The last words of the algo...
"Daisy, daisy, give me your answer, do.
I'm half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won't be a stylish marriage.
I can't afford a carriage.
But you'll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two."
[Now the pod bay doors open].
word is the their own computer executed them by conducting several months of pre-programmed orders in 30 minutes!
hilarious.
Scottrade also jumped ship. No longer using Knight for equity execution. (and with Knight...execution is the operative word).
It is one thing to lose your job because of poor decisions by humans; while we don't have any control, we at least feel that there is a rationale that we can understand, even if we cannot control it.
But to lose your job because some inanimate object went haywire, and then we have to suffer the consequences of a machine . . . that stirs an entirely different set of emotions.
I wouldn't want to be the programmer for that firm; I expect there is a real chance he or she will suffer physical violence for losing control of their program.
Same for anyone in IT, and especially the CIO, who oversees the operation, and will be the target of rage by the newly unemployed.
No excuses, or more likely smart-fanny quips from the wise-mouthed IT types, will be acceptable. In fact, if the IT types have enough brains to get out of a rainstorm, they will disappear and stay as far as possible away from the rest of the employees.
The bigger picture here is that the entire game is on a razor's edge, with a mere cough from a program being all that's needed to crash the game. The entire system lives - or dies - by the proper functioning of machines we all know are famous for not functioning properly.
What a fool's paradise we are building.
But there is one small consolation: the programs don't know, or care, about the elite status of those it destroys. The Ultra-Rich are just as likely to suffer death by digit as is anyone else.
Yes, a small consolation. But hardly enough to keep an unsteady employee on the verge of snapping from focusing his or her rage on the humans who created the monster that destroyed his, or her, life.
And actually, if those who profess we humans are merely highly sophisticated computers are correct, isn't there a certain justice in seeing one "computer" terminate another because the object of wrath was the cause of the computer disaster in the first place . . . . ?
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