“The [Head of One of the Biggest Dark Pools Said] the Amount of Money Devoted to High-frequency Trading Could ‘QUINTUPLE Between this Year and Next’" → Washingtons Blog
“The [Head of One of the Biggest Dark Pools Said] the Amount of Money Devoted to High-frequency Trading Could ‘QUINTUPLE Between this Year and Next’" - Washingtons Blog

Friday, November 6, 2009

“The [Head of One of the Biggest Dark Pools Said] the Amount of Money Devoted to High-frequency Trading Could ‘QUINTUPLE Between this Year and Next’"


In a must-read essay, Senator Ted Kaufman reveals that - despite all of the talk coming out of Washington - high-frequency trading is set to explode:

We've gone from an era dominated by a duopoly of the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to a highly fragmented market of more than 60 trading centers. Dark pools, which allow confidential trading away from the public eye, have flourished, growing from 1.5 percent to 12 percent of market trades in under five years.

Competition for orders is intense and increasingly problematic. Flash orders, liquidity rebates, direct access granted to hedge funds by the exchanges, dark pools, indications of interest, and payment for order flow are each a consequence of these 60 centers all competing for market share.

Moreover, in just a few short years, high frequency trading - which feeds everywhere on small price differences in the many fragmented trading venues - has skyrocketed from 30 to 70 percent of the daily volume.

Indeed, the chief executive of one of the country's biggest block trading dark pools was quoted two weeks ago as saying that the amount of money devoted to high-frequency trading could "quintuple between this year and next."

Mr. President, we have no effective regulation in these markets.

Last week, Rick Ketchum, the Chairman & CEO of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority - the self-regulatory body governing broker-dealers - gave a very thoughtful and candid speech, which I applaud. In it, Mr. Ketchum admitted that we have inadequate regulatory market surveillance.

His candor was refreshing but also ominous: "There is much more to be done in the areas of front-running, manipulation, abusive short selling, and just having a better understanding of who is moving the markets and why."

Mr. Ketchum went on to say:

[T]here are impediments to regulatory effectiveness that are not terribly well understood and potentially damaging to the integrity of the markets...The decline of the primary market concept, where there was a single price discovery market whose on-site regulator saw 90-plus percent of the trading activity, has obviously become a reality. In its place are now two or three or maybe four regulators all looking at an incomplete picture of the market and knowing full well that this fractured approach does not work.
Mr. President, at the same time that we have no effective regulatory surveillance, we have also learned about potential manipulation by high frequency traders.

Last week, the Senate Banking Subcommittee for Securities, Insurance, and Investment held a hearing on a wide range of important market structure issues.

At the hearing, Mr. James Brigagliano, Co-Acting Director of the Division of Trading and Markets, testified that the Commission intends to take a "deep dive" into high frequency trading issues, due to concerns that some high frequency programs may enable possible front-running and manipulation.

Mr. Brigagliano's testimony about his concerns were troubling:
[I]f there are traders taking positions and then generating momentum through high frequency trading that would benefit those positions, that could be manipulation, which would concern us. If there was momentum trading designed - or that actually exacerbated intra-day volatility - that might concern us because it could cause investors to get a worse price. And the other item I mentioned was if there were liquidity detection strategies that enabled high-frequency traders to front-run pension funds and mutual funds that would also concern us.
Reinforcing the case for quick action, several panelists acknowledged that it is a daily occurrence for dark pools to exclude certain possible high frequency manipulators.

For example, Robert Gasser, President and CEO of Investment Technology Group, asserted that surveillance is a "big challenge" and that improving market surveillance must be a regulatory priority:

"I can tell you that there are some frictional trades going on out there that clearly look as if they are testing the boundaries of liquidity provision versus market manipulation."

But none of the panelists, when asked, felt a responsibility to report any of their suspicions of manipulative activity to the SEC. That is up to the regulators and their surveillance to stop, they apparently believe.

Finally, at the end of the hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Reed asked about the reported arrest of a Goldman Sachs employee who had allegedly stolen code from Goldman used for their high frequency trading programs.

A Federal prosecutor, arguing that the judge should set a high bail, said he had been told that with this software there was the danger that a knowledgeable person could manipulate the markets in unfair ways.

The SEC has said it intends to issue a concept release to launch a study of high frequency trading. According to news reports, this will happen next year. Mr. President, I don't believe next year is soon enough. We need the SEC to being its study immediately. Where is the sense of urgency?

Mr. President, our stock markets are also opaque. Again, I refer to Chairman Ketchum's speech: "There are impediments to regulatory effectiveness that are not terribly well understood and potentially damaging to the integrity of the markets."

He went on to say:
We need more information on the entities that move markets - the high frequency traders and hedge funds that are not registered. Right now, we are looking through a translucent veil, and only seeing the registered firms, and that gives us an incomplete - if not inaccurate - picture of the markets.
Senator Schumer echoed this theme at last week's hearing:
Market surveillance should be consolidated across all trading venues to eliminate the information gaps and coordination problems that make surveillance across all the markets virtually impossible today.
Let me repeat: market surveillance across all the markets is "virtually impossible today." And none of the industry witnesses disagreed with Senator Schumer. That is why the SEC must not let months go by without taking meaningful action. We need the Commission to report now on what it should be doing sooner to discover and stop any such high frequency manipulation. Mr. President, where is the sense of urgency? Mr. President, we must also act urgently because high frequency trading poses a systemic risk. Both industry experts and SEC Commissioners have recognized this threat. One industry expert has warned about high-frequency malfunctions:
The next Long Term Capital meltdown would happen in a five-minute time period. ... At 1,000 shares per order and an average price of $20 per share, $2.4 billion of improper trades could be executed in [a] short time frame.
This is a real problem, Mr. President. We have unregulated entities - hedge funds - using high frequency trading programs interacting directly with the exchanges. As Chairman Reed said at last week's hearing, nothing requires that these people even be located within the United States. Known as "sponsored access," hedge funds use the name of a broker-dealer to gain direct trading access to the exchange - but do not have to comply with any of the broker-dealer rules or risk checks. SEC Commissioner Elisse Walter has recognized this threat:
[Sponsored access] presents a variety of unique risks and concerns, particularly when trading firms have unfiltered access to the markets. These risks could affect several market participants and potentially threaten the stability of the markets.

Let me repeat that: "These risks could affect several market participants and potentially threaten the stability of the markets."

Even those on Wall Street responsible for overseeing their firms' high frequency programs are not up to speed on the risks involved, according to a recent study conducted by 7city Learning. In a survey of quantitative analysts, who design and implement high frequency trading algorithms, two-thirds asserted their supervisors "do not understand the work they do."

And though quants and risk managers played a central role exacerbating last year's financial crisis, 86% of those surveyed indicated their supervisors' "level of understanding of the job of a quant is the same or worse than it was a year ago," and 70% said the same about their institutions as a whole.


4 comments:

  1. Secret Software & Naked Short Selling
    We need NSS arrests - not Insider Trading arrests
    It is November 5th, 2009 at high noon and the SEC is all over the news about another arrest. They are all on stage giving this big press conference on 14 arrests for Insider Trading connected to the Galleon Group investigation. Is it Insider Trading? The Government wanted the world to believe this caused the financial meltdown on Wall Street. Three weeks earlier the SEC made the first arrest for Insider Trading involving Raj Rajaratnam and 5 other people on Wall Street.
    It is my opinion that the Government and the SEC is involved in a cover up to try and make people think that it was insider trading that caused the crisis of 2008. Let the truth be known. The news media, along with Goldman Sachs and many other Wall Street companies and people of power are all involved in the biggest cover up in the history of the United States. It involves greed to the fullest extend. The SEC is responsible, under the leadership of Christopher Cox in July 2007, the Securities Exchange Commission abolished the Up Tick rule. The elimination of the Up Tick rule created a wave of corruption that grew out of control, based on Naked Short Selling and the use of secret software and super fast computers.
    Insider trading has played a role in the financial crisis, yet the story not being told by the news media is the arrest of a Goldman Sachs employee who tried to steal Goldman Sachs secret software. This arrest came over the July 4th Holiday week-end and was aired briefly on a Saturday night on TV and then came Monday July 6th, 2009 and the story disapeared. A few weeks later Goldman Sachs reported its FY 2009 2nd QT earnings ( April – May -June ) and Goldman Sachs made over $100 million dollars a day in 46 of the 64 trading days for that quarter. How could this be possible after a 17 month recession. Wall Street changed two major Laws. The first being the use of decimal places (2001 )instead of fraction. Years later and after they lobbied for the removal of the Up Tick rule ( 2007 ) the secret software was designed and in place ready to go into full operation now that Wall Street was allowed to naked short sell millions upon millions of shares that Goldman Sachs and other hedge funds didn’t even own and failed to deliver. Their greed took over, who wouldn’t , when Goldman Sachs was making over $100 million a day in trading. They destroyed companies like Sirius XM radio and overstock.com and many others. Then they began naked shorting the banking industry and attacking each other.
    This is the truth that the news media, corporate Amercia, the SEC, the Government, Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson and the many others that were in power have not told the American people and the world. Now, as I write this letter, they are now trying to con the world into thinking it was insider trading that caused 95% of the middle class workers to lose 20% - 60 % of their investments and 401K’s.
    In the end the Entire story will be told and I hope I get my chance to tell it. Check the facts. There was an arrest of that Goldman Sachs employee in July 2009. Why was it covered up? Where are the arrests for Naked Short Selling and Goldman Sachs use of their secret software that stole the wealth off investors all across the country. It will go down as the biggest scandal in history.

    Richard Keane 11-07-09

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good your getting close to the reality of the stock market.

    However the dark pools always reveal their hand in the price charts.

    http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article9435.html

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree and have been concerned about all the issues raised in the preceding anonymous post. It seems there are the suckers who believe they coventure with corporations seeking business success and then there is Goldman Sachs and their imitators that have stolen all the potential profits through HFT, naked short selling, government collusion, secret dark pools, front running, insider trading, and market manipulating software. (They even take swine flu vaccine from kids). A book needs to be written and published in China,the Moslem world, Russia, the underground press, that exposes the techniques in detail (through reverse engineering)and names the names of the partners at GS and their clones who actually committed the theft.

    ReplyDelete
  4. This has been going on at the SEC for a decade.

    ReplyDelete

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