HFT

After last week's event-a-palooza, where the headlines, the spin, the erroneous HFT trading, and the propaganda (Draghi is too cold; Draghi is too hot; Draghi is just right) just refused to stop, we finally enter the summer proper where all of Europe is on vacation, as is congress. Add on top of this a very light macro event week and an earnings season which has seen the bulk of companies already report, and we expect the volume in the coming 5 days to be among the lowest recorded in 2012, and thus in the past decade. Which of course means that the cannibalization among the market makers will continue as more and more firms succumb to "trading anomalies."

Update via CNBC:

• CITADEL, KRR SAID NO LONGER TO BE LOOKING AT KNIGHT
• KNIGHT CAPITAL CLOSE TO FUNDING DEAL, CNBC'S KATE KELLY SAYS
• KNIGHT MAY GENERATE ABOUT $400 MLN FROM INVESTORS, KELLY SAYS
• GETCO, TD AMERITRADE LIKELY PART OF INVESTMENT GROUP: KELLY

Knight Capital is scrambling: it has a few hours to convince any potential suitors that it is worth some $300 million more alive than having its carcass picked off at a cost of $0.01 over its debt (which itself will likely be materially impaired) in a Chapter 11 Stalking Horse sale. If the Sunday before the Lehman, and MF Global, bankruptcy filings is any indication, the third time will not be the charm for the company whose 1400 employees may have no place to call work at 9am tomorrow. Sadly, in a world in which entire countries and continents have taken on the patina of Schrödingerian felinism, constantly shifting between alive and dead states depending on who is looking, we would take the under on the probability that the firm's lawyers will not be visiting 1 Bowling Green at some point in the next 16 hours.

Knight's credit line expires in 90 minutes. All day it has been a dark box, with virtually no trades coming in or leaving. The company is scrambling, so what happens: some much needed good news finally hits the tape following a TD Ameritrade announcement it has resumed trading with KCG. Will others piggyback as the credit lifeline that is keeping Knight alive expires at the end of the day, and the liquidity runs out, or will firms who explicitly are Knight's competitors in a market which has ever less volume leave it out to hang in hopes of picking up its business on the cheap. A 90 minute difference between life and death for a firm in desperate need of many more such press releases.

While the attached interview between the Casey Report and HFT expert Garrett from CalibratedConfidence will not reveal much unknown new to those who have been following the high frequency trading topic ever since ZH made it a mainstream issue in April of 2009, it will serve as a great foundation for all those new to the topic who are looking for an honest, unbiased introduction to what is otherwise a nebulous and complicated matter. We urge everyone who is even remotely interested in market structure, broken markets and the future of trading to read the observations presented below.

In light of yet another tech driven blowup yesterday at Knight Capital, perhaps someone, anyone, outside of ZH and Themis should look into this nonsense.

Since closing last night, the stock of Knight Capital has moved by nearly 100%, touching on under $2 in the after hours session, and now trading well over $3. The catalyst: a report by the WSJ that the firm has obtained a line of credit. Is this surprising? Not at all, and in fact is standard operating procedure by any firm which is buying hours of life in exchange for usurious lending costs. The lender is most likely a firm which will be a key participant in the forthcoming 363 asset sale, who has obtained a supersecured lien on all the firm's assets, and is also priming all of the other creditors of Knight. The question is whether the lender will be happy with what they find as a result of this 24 hour life line. If not - they simply pull the line of cash and the firm files. Think of it as an advance glance into Knight's books. And that glance will likely not reveal much. With rumors that even JPM has now ended lines with Knight, the New Jersey market maker is simply a closed box: no trades coming in or out, and only has housekeeping cash outflows on its books to keep its employees employed and systems running. We wish them luck. They will need it. None of this would have happened if, as we hoped 3 years ago, proactive steps had been taken to eliminate the threat of HFT.

This may be it. Via Fox News:

• 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.

We all know something went horribly wrong in various NYSE-traded stocks today between 9:30 am and 10:15 am. So wrong in fact that the NYSE had to step in and cancel numerous trades in 6 symbols. However it did not DK millions of other trades in 134 other symbols, the vast majority of which we assume traded errantly due to the market making of Knight Capital (as admitted by the company), which today saw its biggest drop ever since going public on volume about 60 times greater than its average. We also all know that one should buy low and sell high. At least that is what human traders are taught, and that is what they attempt. Because if one consistently does the opposite, one will simply run out of money. Well, the opposite is precisely what the berserk algo in Knight's Market Making group may have done if Nanex, which has done a forensic analysis of one of the trades in question, is correct. In other words, instead of at least attempting to provide liquidity via limit trades, Knight's algorithm acted as a market order... gone horribly wrong. As the third chart below shows what the algo did with furious repetition and steadfast consistency was to buy at the offer, and sell at the bid, in other words buy high and sell low. Over and over and over and over. As Nanex laconically notes, "In the case of EXC, that means losing about 15 cents on every pair of trades. Do that 40 times a second, 2400 times a minute, and you now have a system that's very efficient at burning money." Which also means that by not DK'ing several hundred million prints, the NYSE may have just thrown Knight under the bus, because the market maker is suddenly on the hook for tens if not hundreds of millions in inverse market making profits.

The endless noise and confusion that is the ADP private jobs report (a company which incidentally just missed on its top line), and whose forecast record for NFP is simply atrocious, has posted its second beat in a row, coming at 163K, on expectations of a 120K print, and down from last month's revised 172K. And there is the problem: last month ADP said private industries added 176K jobs. The BLS' NFP print disagreed, coming in at less than half, so sadly anyone trying to gauge what happens on Friday based on today's data will be largely mistaken. But this is all we get before today's FOMC statement, so the bets have to be made, and the market has to decide: will Bernanke make it rain, or won't he, based on 3 days in which economic data has somehow managed to scrape better than expected results. In terms of what really matters: manufacturing jobs as a proxy of the US real economy, was, as usual, sad: +6,000.

US Q2 GDP printed at an annualized rate of 1.5%, just slightly above expectations of 1.4%, and a 25% drop from the Q1 rate of 2.0%, with personal consumption plunging as a key contributor from 1.72% to just 1.05%, and government once again being less and less a detractor from "economic growth." Inventories "added" 0.32% to GDP, a number which in Q3 GDP will subtract from economic "growth." Now whether this headline number is bad enough for the Fed to decide on more QE, is up to Hilsenrath to decide. But in a Bizarro world in which only horrible data boosts the market, today's modest beat will likely not make the market happy, nor sellers of newsletters in which the only strategy is hope and prayer. And just as important, today the BEA revised historical GDP data retroactively. Of note 2010 GDP was revised from 3.0% to 2.4%, while Q3 2011 GDP was revised from 3.0% to 4.1%, indicating that the slowdown we are experiencing is in fact far worse than previously expected. It also shows that HFT trigger buying or selling on GDP data is completely meaningless as today's data will be revised violently higher or lower in a year, making it completely irrelevant.

There is one personality trait that no gold and silver investor should ever be without.

It is a quiet session so far with risk in the Off position (for now - we have yet to see the sinusoid HFT stop triggering function which rises stocks artificially as yesterday demonstrated so very well to nobody's surprise). All eyes are once again focusing to Europe, pushing the EURUSD lower for at least a few more hours until Europe closes and the repatriation resumes.  In terms of key European events, today is the EU finance minister’s conference call on Spain today. As DB summarizes, officials are expected to approve the EU100 billion Spanish bank rescue plan however the exact size of the loan will probably only be determined in September pending the result of a bank-by-bank stress test. This will then pave way for restructuring plans for the sector in October which is broadly consistent with the timeline set out in the leaked draft MoU. At the previous meeting finance ministers agreed to first disburse EU30bn to Spain by the end of July so we will watch out for further confirmation of this today. We may also get the terms of the loan today. The conference call is expected to start at 10am GMT. What is odd is that unlike before when the mere possibility of a European catalyst was enough to push risk higher, this is no longer the case, and Spanish spreads to Bunds just hit another all time wide, with the Spanish 10 Year plunging to 7.11%, another post-summit high, this time dragging the Italian 10 Year which was at 6.10% at last check. Will the world once again be able to ignore the once-again imploding European reality (and American: Of the 35 S&P 500 firms that reported results yesterday, about 74% of those came ahead of market consensus but only 57% of those topped sales forecasts.), and send the ES to a green close on the day? Or is today the day when reality comes back with a vengeance? Stay tuned and find out.

Much has been said about the evil crony capitalism inflicted upon America as a result of PAC, SuperPACs, corporate donations, and just general bribery on behalf of America's corporations in broad terms, and Wall Street in narrow (and Private Equity firms in uber-narrow) terms. But is there an even bigger destabilizing force of "cronyness" in America? According to the WSJ, there well may be: labor unions. Yes: those same entities that are so critical for Obama's reelection campaign that the president abrogated property rights and overturned the entire bankruptcy process in the case of GM and Chrysler, to benefit various forms of organized labor at the expense of evil, evil bondholders (represented on occasion by such even more evil entities as little old grandmas whose retirement money had been invested in GM bonds), appear to have a far greater impact in bribe-facilitated decision-making than previously thought.

Joe Saluzzi, expert on algorithmic trading -- also known as high-frequency trading, or HFT -- returns as a guest this week to explain how the players behind this machine-driven process act as parasites that are destroying our financial markets (and, increasingly, even themselves). Since Joe first spoke with us last year, HFT firms have only increased in size and share of market activity. Here are some staggering statistics on how influential they have become:

• HTFs make up between 50-70% of the volume seen across market exchanges today
• 2% of the traders on many exchanges (HFTs, specifically) represent 80% of the volume
• a single large HFT firm (referred to as a Direct Market Maker) can account for 10%+ of a market's volume on a given day
• Large HFT firms make between $8 to $21 billion a year
• HFT trades occur in milliseconds (i.e. a small fraction of the time it takes your eye to blink)

With such scale, speed and profitability, HFTs have turned the market away from being an efficient price-setting mechanism and perverted it into a casino where the clientele (i.e. human investors) gets fleeced. And our regulators are so outmatched by the scope, complexity and funding of these titanic HFT players that at moment, there are pretty much zero consequences for bad actors.

With Europe, the BBA, and virtually everyone shocked, shocked, that the global bank cabal schemed and colluded for years to manipulate interest rates, so far only America appears relatively blase, and totally ignorant, about the issue. Perhaps it is because the first bank exposed in the manipulation scheme so far is European, perhaps because it is just tired of all the endless crime coming out of the criminal complex known as Wall Street. It is unclear. Then again, America will soon have its own manipulation scandals to deal with: and if it is not the US BBA member banks, all of whom were just as guilty as Barclays, and the only question is which bank will be the sacrificial scapegoat whose CEO will have to demonstratively depart (to warmer, non-extradition climes), it will be the following story from Bloomberg which will likely pick up much more steam over the next weeks and months, detailing how the bank which just barely avoided a triple notch downgrade (wink wink) has had previous dealings with the very same rating agencies seeking to, picture this, artificially inflate ratings! So to summarize: Fed manipulates capital markets, HFT manipulates bid ask spreads, "self-policing" CDS pricing market groups fudge the prices on trillions in Credit Default Swaps, bank cabals collude and manipulate short-term interest rates, and now banks are confirmed to have manipulated the ratings on tens of billions of bonds using monetary incentives and threats. Is there anything in this "market" that was fair over the past several decades, and was actual price discovery ever actually possible? Because by now it should be very clear going forward all the things that actually make a free and fair market are forever gone, and that without endless fraud and manipulation by all the market participants who realize that anyone defecting the ponzi group means immediate and terminal losses for all, and all those calls for an S&P 400 would actually prove to be overly optimistic.