Blackrock

When China was closed for one week at the end of September, something which helped catalyze the biggest weekly surge in US stocks in years, out of sight meant out of mind, and many (mostly algos) were hoping that China's problems would miraculously just go away. Alas after yesterday's latest trade data disappointment, it was once again China which confirmed that nothing is getting better with its economy in fact quite the contrary, and one quick look at the chart of wholesale, or factory-gate deflation, below shows that China is rapidly collapsing to a level last seen in 2009 because Chinese PPI plunged by 5.9% Y/Y, its 43rd consecutive drop - a swoon which is almost as bad as Caterpillar retail sales data.

It appears Chinese authorities want to be the monopoly manipulator of their stock markets. Just a week after BlackRock suggested (and Hillary spewed) plans for transaction taxes in US markets to effectively kill high-frequency-trading (and all its ills), China's Securities Regulator Commission (CSRC) has proposed limiting the use of automated trading programs in the stock market. Of course, just as we saw last nght in China futures, we assume CSRC only wants to ban "selling" algos and not "spoofers" pushing stocks higher.

We would argue the main reason for Blackrock’s attempt to persuade the exchanges to adopt its recommendations on trading halts is that Blackrock itself is inconvenienced by downside volatility. Presumably the company is no stranger to leverage (how else can it squeeze out large returns with a portfolio this large in a ZIRP world?) and is therefore forced to exercise stop loss orders itself when the market declines fast. Such attempts to “regulate” everything, even the price swings markets are allowed to make, are attempts to stem oneself against nature.

Following yesterday's flip-flop on TPP, Hillary Clinton has unleashed some new financial system 'policies' this morning, the most crucial of which includes the provision of a transaction tax which will dramatically penalize high-frequency traders (gratifying critics of HFT's instability-creating market structure). The question is, who is she trying to appease with this 'policy'? The answer is simple - Follow the money... once again.

"As you know, the environment for global macro fundamentals-based trading continues to be challenging. That factor, combined with the lack of certainty over when a recovery will take hold, led us to conclude that the time was right to return capital to you."

"It was our Black Monday. The big question is when will they come back, because managers have been really quite reliant on Sama for business in recent years."

"This is a risky business. Can they get it wrong? Absolutely they can get it wrong."

With the SEC moving to head off the risk of a bond market meltdown triggered by a dangerous combination of illiquidity and bond fund proliferation, WSJ decided to see which fund providers are the most at risk in a crisis. The list may surprise you...

Ever since Simon Potter's 2012 arrival as head of The NYFed's trading desk, the manipulation of VIX (and thus its reflexive levered tail wagging the algo-driven dog of the indices) has been front-and-center day-after-day in the so-called US equity 'market'. While only fringe-blogs have noticed this in the past, now The FT admits that not only was recent volatility in markets exacerbated by VIX ETFs (thus confirming the tail-wagging-dog analogy), and further, the nature of the link between VIX ETFs and VIX Futures (rebalancing) enables frontrunning which serves to reinforce any trend into the close and thus manipulate the markets.

"In theory, investors can exit an open-ended mutual fund or an ETF at will. But the growing popularity of these funds forces them to invest in an ever larger share of less liquid bonds. If everyone wants to exit at once, prices could fall very far, very fast. A lucky few may get out in time. Others will probably get trampled."

While it is already common knowledge that China has thrown virtually everything at the market in order to halt the ongoing market crash, including arresting "malicious sellers", journalists, and suspicious hedge fund managers, blaming HFTs for daring to sell in addition to buy, and even making trading index futures practically impossible, perhaps the most interesting revelation showcasing China's desperation came from CNBC today which reported that the government recently invited none other than Mr. ETF himself, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink to "discuss the market situation there", or said otherwise: how to manipulate the market better.

When it comes to soliciting opinions, the NY Fed in general, and former Goldmanite Bill Dudley in particular, care about just one group of "advisors" - the Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets (a group created in July 2009 after the 2008 market crash) also known as the billionaires who run the country's biggest hedge funds, prop desks and PE firms, including JPM, Credit Suisse, Apollo, Blackrock, Blue Mountain, Brevan Howard, Tudor, Fortress, and lo and behold, David "Balls to the Wall" Tepper.

During Monday's flurry of tripped circuit breakers and flash crashing mayhem, ETF investors learned the hard way that Howard Marks was precisely correct when he warned that ETFs "can't be more liquid than the underlying and we know the underlying can become highly illiquid." The question now, is whether subsequent flash crashes will trigger even more spectacular divergences between fair value and ETF unit prices on the way to proving, once and for all, that ETFs may indeed be the new financial weapons of mass destruction.

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.

It is what happened in investment grade fund flows in the latest week that is making CEO, especially those whose compensation is a direct function of how much stock they repurchase, very nervous because as Lipper reported overnight IG funds just saw $1.8 billion in outflows, the most in over two years or since June 2013. And without the fund inflow train into IG funds operating smoothly, suddenly stock buybacks appear in jeopardy...