Oh yah, I concur. I remember when February hit the fan, the NQ spreads widened a great deal after the retail was scared away. I recall it being bad until around April. Then everything calmed down to the normal 1-tick spread level from then until the Oct nightmare, and while it comes and goes now, it is there more often than not.
Sell-offs could be down to machines that control 80% of the US stock market, fund manager says Many believe that the different sell-off episodes seen throughout 2018 were caused by these machines, as they act on immediate data releases, without taking the time to digest them as humans would. The daily volume of algo trading can change according to volatility. But over the last few years its impact has become more visible. Silvia Amaro | @Silvia_Amaro https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/05/sel...80percent-of-us-stocks-fund-manager-says.html
That is what happens when HFt pull all of their orders and ther is no liquidity. THEY are the book. you pull orders by cancelling them That wasn't even much volume to move it that far due to all of the orders being cancelled. The hft are atomic clock synced and any mkt activity mix ups or randomization.. like.. oh hey.. wednesday mkt closed then the hft algos do not undertand how to trade.. so when there is massive risk the HFT jsut go offline or cancel all orders and walla.. you get price movement without any real sells.
spreads do not widen when retail leaves.. there i svery little retail trading the futures period. thats why it is even mroe of a losing game than day tradign stocks.. they see you coming much easier. spreads ONLY widen when the HFT synthetic mkt makers widen it due to perceived risk of them not capturing the spread. 90 % of all lorders on the cme limit order book are just hft layering the book.. not you and me trading.
and volatility is good for traders .. ha ha yeah right. at that fall rate it would only take the nasdaq 66 minutes to fall to zero
an event liek that is not news driven. that is a mini flash crash.. HFT algo cacneleld all orders and didnt come bacck online it was safe for them to print money again
Your right... Cancelled and Spoofed, Dow went from -350 to -301 in no time now back to -322, might not be too bad tomorrow after all. It seems the December rally will happen, this will shook up the fed, there is no way they are rising rates December 19th, algo's will sell off into Oblivion and managers will allow it, they literally all use Trend Following and feed off one and other, nobody is buying the dip if they raise rates and it'll be chaos
Perhaps you've become accustomed to things being too easy. This was only down -2.5%, followed by a 1% bounce. Hardly "crash" territory.... unless you're highly leveraged, that is.
There are a lot of futures. So an Elite Trader would at least mention about which future he is speaking. Clearly not the ES.