HFT

Quantitative easing, as this policy is known, has bailed out bonus-happy banks and made the rich richer.  Banks have been the biggest beneficiaries, with their 20- or 30-times leveraged balance sheets. Asset managers and hedge funds have benefited, too. Owners of property have made out like bandits. In fact, anyone with assets has grown much richer. All of us who work in financial markets owe a debt to QE.

One can’t help being left slack-jawed witnessing that the Fed has just publicly inserted itself into geopolitics via its monetary policy as de facto first responder/savior of all economies. Even if it puts U.S. savers, retirees, along with its economy in the back seat.

In the end, whatever the Feds announce at 2PM NY time today should not affect your long-term outlook on markets as neither of the two possible decisions will significantly alter the future fate of global markets. Instead, the most important thing to understand is the massive fraud that is systemic in the global financial system and to allow a deep and complex understanding of this fraud to drive your investment decisions.

In a day in which the total breakdown of the market and the sheer dominance of various HFT algos was painfully obvious for any remaining carbon-based trader forms to see, we started off with not one but two E-mini trading halts following ridiculous buying slams. As a result, first thing today we asked "what exactly happened at 6:12am?" We now know.

Last week’s volatility to the downside was entirely predictable, as the first leg down during this ongoing market crash reached the correction stage of 11%. The technical bounce was a given, as the 30 year old HFT MBAs on Wall Street have been trained like rats to BTFD. In their lemming like minds, it has worked for the last six years of this Federal Reserve created “bull market”, so why wouldn’t it work now. Last week was their first lesson in why it doesn’t work during bear markets, and we’ve entered a bear market. John Hussman seems amused at the shallowness of the arguments by Wall Street shills and CNBC cheerleaders about the future of the stock market in his weekly letter. After this modest pullback from all-time highs, the S&P 500 is still overvalued by 92%...

Thousands of investors with stop-loss orders on their ETFs saw those positions crushed in the first 30 minutes of trading last Monday, August 24th. Seeing a price blow right through your stop is perhaps the worst experience in all of investing because it seems like such a betrayal. “Hey, isn’t this what a smart investor is supposed to do? What do you mean there was no liquidity at my stop? What do you mean I got filled $5 below my stop? Wait… now the price is back above my stop! Is this for real?” Welcome to the Big Leagues of Investing Pain.

Llast week, during which the S&P 500 was up 0.9% as the market rebounded off of Tuesday’s lows, BofAML clients were net buyers of $5.6bn of US stocks—the biggest inflow in our data history (since ’08) following five weeks of selling. The last time  flows were close to these levels was during the (less extreme) volatility in early January of this year, as well as following the Tech/Biotech sell-off in early 2014 (see chart below). Net buying last week was broad based—while no client group saw record flows relative to its own history, hedge funds, institutional clients and private clients were all big net buyers which led to record inflows when combined.

It doesn’t make sense to you. And it shouldn’t to anyone. Unless – they first go directly to the ‘house bar and media entertainment center’ that is always open and always free with spiked Kool-Aid™. It works better and is cheaper than actual liquor. It’s not actually a drink per se. It’s just hoopla and endless propaganda for the masses. That’s why it’s free and encouraged. It keeps everyone happy within the walls and enhances the experience, while simultaneously acting as one non-stop running commercial to entice anyone foolish to think they too can get rich quick. All legal by the way. The laws were adapted to fit the criteria.

Attempts to explain exactly what happened last Monday when prices for a whole host of ETFs and mutual funds diverged markedly from fair value abound and while there's no way to know for sure exactly what went wrong, FactSet has drawn some tentative conclusions after conducting a bit of "voodoo, tea-leaf reading."

The week that passed has left many of the so-called “smart crowd” flummoxed, disheveled, dismayed, and disrobed from their expensive facades of “expert insightful analysis.” It seems all that “expert” as well as “insight” wasn’t all it was made out to be. In less than a week: historic records weren’t only broken – they were smashed to smithereens. And the one’s that were the most historic? They weren’t set for positive things.

Luckily we didn't hear anything more about Vomiting Camel formations but there was certainly an ample amount of "it's priced in" blaring in the background.

Simply put, a perfect storm of failing trends...

During Monday's flash crashing mayhem, the fragility of the ETF pricing system was exposed for all to see. While common sense dictates that the extreme market moves, trading halts, and tripped circuit breakers may have had quite a lot to do with the epic divergences between NAV and unit pricing, the real culprit was a "computer glitch" caused by a botched "systems change" last Saturday. The fact that the trouble calculating NAVs across nearly 800 mutual funds happened on the very same day as the flash crash is strictly coincidence. 

While oil prices are surging (global economic meltdown averted), stocks are back in the green on the week (crisis averted), and bonds are collapsing (not because of China selling according to the mainstream because "everything is awesome" again), we point traders' attention to the continued inversion in the VIX term structure. While well off the peak crisis levels, we have a long way to go to "normalized" levels of risk...