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Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

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Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#191

http://invezz.com/news/alternative-investments/625-uk-report... "Veteran traders would usually wait in anticipation for the weekly report of gas-inventory figures by the U.S. Energy Information Administration released on Thursday at 10.30 AM and then dive into the busiest trading window of the week. This is no longer true as most traders are now staying out of the market due to the HFTs new strategy - sending floods…

At what point will HFT drive out the proper functioning of a Market? Have there been any studies on this? If human traders mostly reacted to "real" news (the Orange juice crop is bad this year) then human trading was mostly linked to actual changes that affect the price mechanism But if large volumes of trades are speculative, or even worse, are directed at affecting the behaviour of other large Market players, is th…

OP is referring to a case of a buggy algorithm in a bot which was setting a ridiculous price on a used textbook on Amazon: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

HFT has already caused at least one "flash crash": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_trading#May_6.2C...

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#192
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data are printed with the CME's and NYSE's official timestamps. It would not be unprecedented for the CME's timestamps to diverge from, say, the NYSE's. That would present itself as a consistent temporal dislocation between the CME and NYSE, but would be invisible within each data-set (sort of like your calendar putting itself into the wrong time-zone where - the times are off, but they're consistently off, i.e.…

I've seen exchanges screw up clock time more often than I care to remember, often for the stupidest reason. I once had an exchange claim it was "due to a roofing contractor accidentally interfering with the satellite used to get a GPS time signal".

I would think that exchanges would be one of the few places on earth to nail clock time because they are so dependent on it.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#193

A fun thought experiment. Suppose someone invents a time machine that gives the correct price of all securities at all future points in time. 1) Would it be against current rules to trade on this information? 2) If someone did use this machine surreptitiously to their own gain, how quickly will they approach owning 100% of everything? 3) If the entire data set of future prices were made publicly available, what would…

2) Depends what they're trading, and how much capital they have to start with. If our inventor can only buy and sell the S&P 500 they can't make a whole lot - it generally climbs at a pretty steady, known rate; when it moves dramatically it's usually a fall rather than a rise, so you need to be able to short to take advantage of those moments. If the inventor's buying and selling junk bonds, or advanced derivatives contracts, they can make money pretty quickly for as long as they can find people willing to trade with them.

Also the total value available to be made in HFT is pretty low (on the order of tens of billions of dollars/year). To make serious money you need enough capital to be able to make somewhat longer-term investments.

3) Prices for mature, stable, dividend-paying companies would increase a little bit so that their P/E matched that of Treasury bonds. Futures contracts would probably stick around (although they're now essentially just another form of loan) but options would disappear, because you'd have to be stupid to buy/sell them.

The effect on the industry is that there's a lot less inefficiency available to exploit, so much less money to be made. The industry contracts; market-making becomes a boring way to earn small amounts of money, like car insurance. The smart people go elsewhere.

For riskier investments and especially young companies we'd see more dramatic shifts; a share in Facebook is now worth however much a share in Facebook is worth as a mature company (discounted by the risk-free interest rate). So a few would shoot up to 40x their current value, while many would drop low enough to be delisted.

In the slightly longer term an IPO becomes some kind of weird singularity - everyone knows which companies are going to be huge, as soon as they go public. The SEC would hopefully relax the rules (because their reporting rules are now basically obsolete) so we'd see companies being listed much sooner, or even funded based on whether or not they show up in the future data. Suddenly, every startup is a megahit, and there are many more of them, because it's now a safe way to make enormous amounts of money, so everyone wants to found one (or at least, everyone who has it in them to found one that works). The market abhors safe ways to make lots of money, so all the investment money available pours into this, and we hit the singularity in fairly short order.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#194
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small investors can only buy on bad news and long where applicable (i.e good company). Bad news and poor technical performance even if for a period is guaranteed almost to be driven down by HFT. And sometimes HFT over does it (maybe on purpose to let the suckers flood back in). I.e. Apple going to 430, Netflix to mid 50s after similar shorts/run ups and battle of machines. We all will be using HFT soon via proxy or a…

> Small investors can only buy on bad news and long where applicable (i.e good company). Bad news and poor technical performance even if for a period is guaranteed almost to be driven down by HFT. And sometimes HFT over does it (maybe on purpose to let the suckers flood back in). I.e. Apple going to 430, Netflix to mid 50s after similar shorts/run ups and battle of machines. I think Apple's a weird case. They had a "…

That's not a weird case, that's fairly classic (though utterly irrational) market behaviour.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point will HFT drive out the proper functioning of a Market? Have there been any studies on this? If human traders mostly reacted to "real" news (the Orange juice crop is bad this year) then human trading was mostly linked to actual changes that affect the price mechanism But if large volumes of trades are speculative, or even worse, are directed at affecting the behaviour of other large Market players, is th…

I think that HFT is responsible for over 70% of the volume on the major exchanges these days. Very little of what happens on the exchanges anymore is directly attributable to long positions. I'm not sure how current this is, but the average time a stock is held is roughly 20 seconds [1] and that's definitely not long-term value investing. I think we're already a long ways away from Kansas Dorothy, and I don't think w…

High frequency trader here:

This is only looking at the volume on public exchanges. There are a lot of regulations around public exchanges which prevent them from operating efficiently. For instance, unless the stock has a very small price, you cannot offer sub-penny prices on this exchange.

Most retail trades actually never see the exchange, they are sold in bulk by brokers to places like Knight or Getco who internalize the order flow. They cross customer orders and take on some orders. Since this does not happen on a public exchange, they can give sub-penny price improvements.

The same happen with dark pools where many hedge funds will send their trade to obtain better executions.

When the market makers who handle these order flow start carrying to much risk on their book, or if they don't want to take the opposite side of your trade, they send it to the stock exchange.

This means that the stock exchange is mostly a place where high-frequency traders meet to offset their exposures to one another. In this respect, it is not surprising, nor problematic that 70% of the volume come from HFT.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#196

A fun thought experiment. Suppose someone invents a time machine that gives the correct price of all securities at all future points in time. 1) Would it be against current rules to trade on this information? 2) If someone did use this machine surreptitiously to their own gain, how quickly will they approach owning 100% of everything? 3) If the entire data set of future prices were made publicly available, what would…

On 3, I think it depends on your time-travel rules. Because the first thing that would happen is that people would flock to retool to produce the higher value commodities (if corn price > wheat price, people would stop making wheat and start making corn), causing a supply glut and price collapse.

I think based on "invent a time machine" the implication is that Perfect Trader X (I imagine him dressed like Racer X) would make a trade, then gather future information based on his latest trade, then make the next trade.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#197

What is the benefit of trading over ms resolutions. What problem is it solving? Wouldn't trade be more efficient if it were lock stepped - say one trade per hour (per day?): you agree your trade and the exchange processes it on the hour. What would be lost that benefits the pseudo-capitalism of these systems by having such a regime. How would this negatively impact production.

>What is the benefit of trading over ms resolutions. What problem is it solving?

The problem it's solving is that people want to do it. Exchanges on which they can't are outcompeted by exchanges on which they can.

>Wouldn't trade be more efficient if it were lock stepped - say one trade per hour (per day?):

No.

>you agree your trade and the exchange processes it on the hour.

You "agree" your trade outside the exchange? What do you think an exchange is?

>What would be lost that benefits the pseudo-capitalism of these systems by having such a regime. How would this negatively impact production.

Spreads would get wider, i.e. more investor cash would get creamed off by middlemen, leaving less for the productive companies it was actually invested in.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that HFT is responsible for over 70% of the volume on the major exchanges these days. Very little of what happens on the exchanges anymore is directly attributable to long positions. I'm not sure how current this is, but the average time a stock is held is roughly 20 seconds [1] and that's definitely not long-term value investing. I think we're already a long ways away from Kansas Dorothy, and I don't think w…

> over 70% of the volume on the major exchanges these days. Very little of what happens on the exchanges anymore is directly attributable to long positions. this isn't the same as being 70% of price movement. HFT is comprised mostly of market makers, who have books that, over the course of the day, are close to net zero. they do a lot of buys, but they also do a lot of sells. most price moves over the course of a day…

That's not the whole story. If 70% of the volume is HFT, it means you necessarily have a lot of HFT trading against HFT, which means a lot of HFT is going to be liquidity taking.

Fortunately, that's only on public exchanges. Most of the liquidity provision happens before trade even hit those exchanges.

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#199

http://invezz.com/news/alternative-investments/625-uk-report... "Veteran traders would usually wait in anticipation for the weekly report of gas-inventory figures by the U.S. Energy Information Administration released on Thursday at 10.30 AM and then dive into the busiest trading window of the week. This is no longer true as most traders are now staying out of the market due to the HFTs new strategy - sending floods…

At what point will HFT drive out the proper functioning of a Market? Have there been any studies on this? If human traders mostly reacted to "real" news (the Orange juice crop is bad this year) then human trading was mostly linked to actual changes that affect the price mechanism But if large volumes of trades are speculative, or even worse, are directed at affecting the behaviour of other large Market players, is th…

You could make the (weak) argument that HFT has created market inefficiencies due to excess liquidity and furthering information asymmetry. Most exchanges (NYSE, NASDAQ, BATS, etc) have "circuit breakers" to prevent a massive sell-off. As far as "noise in the market", you could make the argument that speculative trading is simply that: noise. In this case it is just an algobot doing the noise trading, rather than some idiot that thinks he's found the next best way to "beat the market".

Re: Someone got the natural gas report 400 ms early

#200
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data are printed with the CME's and NYSE's official timestamps. It would not be unprecedented for the CME's timestamps to diverge from, say, the NYSE's. That would present itself as a consistent temporal dislocation between the CME and NYSE, but would be invisible within each data-set (sort of like your calendar putting itself into the wrong time-zone where - the times are off, but they're consistently off, i.e.…

Relative timestamps between venues don't matter. More importantly, using timestamps without a common reference point makes it impossible to assert what happened first, because the absolute value of the timestamp does not matter. What matters is what "really" happened first. Of course, everyone's view of "first" can differ, but that's a different issue. Whether there is signal here or not wasn't my point. There may we…

"(a) can be accomplished by Nanex, if they so choose."

Doing so doesn't give them a sensationalist headline that finds its way to the top of HN.

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