Circuit Breakers

Contrary to expectations that the BOJ would injected "only" JPY2 trillion in its emergency operation earlier, Shirikawa came out with a stunner, putting in a whopping 7 trillion yen into Japanese money markets. From Reuters: "The Bank of Japan on Monday injected a hefty 7 trillion yen ($85 billion) into the money market in a same-day market operation aimed at soothing market jitters after a massive earthquake and tsunami hit northeastern Japan. This was the central bank's first so-called same-day operation since last May, when the Greek debt crisis roiled the global financial markets. BOJ Governor Masaaki Shirakawa said on Sunday that the central bank would provide huge amounts of liquidity to the banking system on Monday, reinforcing the bank's determination to keep markets stable in the wake of the disaster." In the meantime, after the Nikkei has plunged over 5%, and the Topix down by 7%, circuit breakers have been activated on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Elsewhere, the US plunge protection is hard at work, sending futures surging from the overnight drop, after reality threatened to impose itself. Another masterful showing by Sack Frost.

Core Molding, Nucor Steel, and now Plantronics. Individual flash crashes have become such a daily occurrence that they are expected, in fact hoped for, if merely to confirm that nobody but a bunch of deranged robots is left trading stocks. While you won't hear about it on CNBC, as it may go just a little against the station's puff piece on how HFT is not, like, really all that bad, on Friday, just after 2 pm, the stock price of Plantronics (PLT) plunged from $31 to $24 in the span of milliseconds. And most amusingly, not a single circuit breaker was triggered in the plunge! The reason - the SEC's panacea to SkyNet, which incidentally is never proactive and always reactive, the contraption known as circuit breakers, is only applicable to Russell 1000 stocks. PLT, however, with a 'modest' market cap of $1.5 billion belongs only in the Russell 2000 index, which doesn't have any single-stock circuit breakers tied to it. The result: a whole lot of trades that should have cost the rampant algo millions in losses. But never fear: the Nasdaq steps in and makes life for its clients all peachy (while spitting in the faces of everyone else), DKing all the "clearly erroneous" trades, once again confirming that any price discovery that occurs not in compliance with what the exchanges believe is a fair and honest price have no chance in hell of standing. After all, the ponzi monster must be fed with ever increasing stock "prices" even if such prices are merely in the eye of the beholder, the exchange, and the several robots that do all the trading which #Ref out the second there is a pronounced downtick.

Been a while since people cared about this info. Always good to keep in mind.