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A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

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Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#11
post #6

This is basically the primary trading strategy employed in the The Ugly Americans . The time period covered is mid 1990's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugly_Americans:_The_True_Story...

Was The Ugly Americans good? I really enjoyed Bringing Down the House.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#13
Mom-and-pop investors cannot take advantage of this (and many other opportunities) because they have to feed a long chain of middlemen through prohibitively high costs of trading as well as always being on the worst side of bid-ask spreads.

And then of course the value and the cost of high quality information delivered to you in a timely manner is a bit different than staring on CNBC screens.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#14
I suspect this is more complex than just frontrunning. An article from the Fed Reserve Bank of NY from 2011 discusses the whole process of being listed on an index. Firms selected have been outperforming the market for several years at least, and their metrics have been improving even before selection is announced. This may be why these companies were chosen to replace others that are failing.

The Fed report found that there is no long term impact of being chosen to be on an index.

http://www.newyorkfed.org/research/staff_reports/sr484.pdf

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#15

I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article. I personally know 3 people who run their own money ( Having said that, this isn't exactly easy. You need to know 1) if a stock is going into the index 2) when its going into the index 3) how much the index will buy 4) how much the index buy will affect the price of the stock the first 3 are trivial for some index funds, though most have rules that allow them…

It's a nice, clear example of the anti-inductivity of the market: http://lesswrong.com/lw/yv/markets_are_antiinductive/

The very act of noticing that something is a good strategy, and beginning to trade on it, will over time drain away the utility of the strategy, until it is useless or worse than useless.

Tracking indexes is "big", and has some brute simplicity about it, but eventually the market will eliminate that as a viable investment mechanism. (But that won't stop your metaphorical Dad from swearing up and down you need to buy index funds....)

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#16

I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article. I personally know 3 people who run their own money ( Having said that, this isn't exactly easy. You need to know 1) if a stock is going into the index 2) when its going into the index 3) how much the index will buy 4) how much the index buy will affect the price of the stock the first 3 are trivial for some index funds, though most have rules that allow them…

I'm sure you are aware of this and decided not to go into the details, but for the benefit of others it's even a bit more convoluted than that. The index does not "buy" anything, there's a company that manages the index and just decides on the weights of each stock. There are then several mutual funds and ETFs that track that index who will actually have to buy/sell stock. So 3) is really 3a) how much the index weights will change 3b) which funds are tracking the index, and what's their total market cap 3c) what are the net outflows into each stock resulting from previous 2.

And sometimes a stock might be entering an index but leaving another (e.g., moving from Russell 2000 to Russell 1000), so the net result might be opposite to what you'd naively expect.

So yes, it is possible to make money doing this, but it's not a sure thing.

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#17

How is this considered unethical? If you know X will buy loads of shares of an equity and you learned that fact legally through (presumably) public channels, are you A) a scoundrel, or B) smart, for buying shares before X buys those shares? When somebody does something out of the ordinary it's necessarily considered a "game" (read "scam") by the majority establishment. The reality is that the index is buying the stoc…

The reality is that the index is buying the stock because it views it as a good value

That's not how all indexes work. The FTSE100, for example, is simply the 100 largest companies on the LSE by market cap[0].

And many indexes (DFA being an exception that I'm aware of[1]) weight companies by their market cap, so the rebalancing trades made by index funds aren't based on value so much as an algorithm.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTSE_100_Index

1 - http://assetbuilder.com/investing/dfa_vs_vanguard

Re: A Profitable and Legal Way to Game the Stock Market

#20

I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article. I personally know 3 people who run their own money ( Having said that, this isn't exactly easy. You need to know 1) if a stock is going into the index 2) when its going into the index 3) how much the index will buy 4) how much the index buy will affect the price of the stock the first 3 are trivial for some index funds, though most have rules that allow them…

What kind of ROI do they get doing this? Better than 5%?
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