HFT

In the past week, ever since the Fed's FOMC minutes which sent the S&P tumbling from 2100 to their lows in the overnight session, some 13% lower, the US economy underwent the functional equivalent of a 15 bps rate hike, or more than half the rate hike that the Fed has been so terrified to engage in for years.

Take your pick - here's three good reasons to engineer a "crash" that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Whether it’s intentional or accidental. The more Mom and Pop tunes out – the less to feed on for the HFT’s till eventually there’s no one left to feed on except for themselves – and I believe you are witnessing in real-time this exact phenom which will be brought on not only quicker, but with more ferocity moving forward. For Mom and Pop are not coming back to either the “markets” or CNBC. They’re done.

Following the biggest (and only) market correction in years, the biggest weekly surge in the VIX ever, the second wholesale market flash crash in history coupled with the first ever limit down trade in the Nasdaq and the E-Mini, not to mention the biggest intraday bearish reversal since Lehman, it would appear that the "smart money" actually was aptly named.

One of the fallacies being propagated about yesterday's flash crash, is that somehow HFTs came riding in as noble white knights and rescued the market from a collapse instead of actually causing it. This particular lie is worth a few quick observations and explanations of what really happened.

With professionals proclaiming yesterday's meltdown "historic," and generously telling investors "don't try to overthink what you're seeing," it is clear that the real impact of the carnage wrought by a combination of Fed-indiced crowded trades and HFT illiquidity-providers is yet to be fully appreciated. While Financial advisers, almost unanimously, have cautioned clients not to panic... As one retail investor exclaimed, yesterday's open "was a life-changing 20 minutes."

So to be technically accurate, what happened in May 2010 was one marketwide flash crash, while today we had a market paralysis which was the direct result of countless isolated mini flash crashes, all of which precipitated the market from failing for the first 30 minutes of trading.

My advice to my generation if they would like to buy various assets is to just literally say to yourself, "Don't think about the price or what other people are paying. Just ask: 'What would I pay for 1 share of XYZ, knowing it has an artificial edifice around it?'" Then take a swing while flying blind and pray you hit it.

But until that is no longer the case, count me out. Me and my entire generation.

By starving investors of safe return, activist Fed policy has promoted repeated valuation bubbles, and inevitable collapses, in risky assets. On the basis of valuation measures having the strongest correlation with actual subsequent market returns, we fully expect the S&P 500 to decline by 40-55% over the completion of the current market cycle. The only uncertainty has been the triggers.

HFT critics are crowing over the ITG confession. You see! HFT is front running, plain and simple! Told you! And HFT defenders are largely silent because... well, you can’t defend the indefensible. However, if history is any guide at all, the existence of a clearly identifiable small-v villain will forestall the unmasking of what we believe is a Big Bad... the subterranean influence, bordering on control, of human investment behaviors by firms controlling advanced inference machines.

The following map lays out the embedded, and regulator blessed, latencies between the three big New Jersey exchange centers: Mahwah (NYSE), Secaucus (BATS), and Carteret (Nasdaq) for everyone but the top tier exchange clients, the HFTs, who are greenlighted to frontrun everyone else, and generate quarter after quarter of perfect trading records.

Earlier today, one of the biggest farces of 2015 was remedied when a UK judge granted Sarao a bail reduction from £5m to £50,000 and was allowed to leave prison as soon as today. As profiled before, Sarao had been at the infamous Wandsworth prison - Britain's worst - since his arrest. As the FT reports, at a court hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court in London today, a lawyer for the US said he would not oppose the bail reduction.

It doesn't get more flagrant than this: the full HFT criminal monty exposed for all to see.

The WSJ reported that none other than the operator of the biggest dark pool in the US by volume, Credit Suisse and its massive Crossfinder dark pool, "is in talks with regulators to settle allegations of wrongdoing at its “dark pool” with a record fine in the high tens of millions of dollars, according to people familiar with the matter." What is grotesque about this story, is that back in December 2012, it was none other than Credit Suisse which conveniently explained and laid out all those forms of HFT manipulation which we accused virtually every HFT firm of employing since 2009... and which Credit Suisse itself is now accused of engaging in!

No lesser liquidity-providing high-frequency-trading never-a-losing-trade shop than Virtu financial has been 'allowed' to trade Chinese capital markets. Coming just days after Citadel's ban, one can only assume that Chinese regulators made a deal with the devil CEO Doug Cifu to levitate markets at any and every cost in order to pick up pennies in front of de-leveraging, over-margined army of farmers and grandmas now seeking exits. Sure enough for the second day in a row margin debt is on the rise again. The retail-dominated Chinese stock market will be ripe picking for the HFTs, as long as not to many are allowed and a tail-chasing flash-crash ensues... but for now its appears yesterday afternoon's selling pressure continues with CSI-300 down almost 2% at the open.