Are you a novice by any chance...? Disorder at the worst possible times...??? To think that you could introduce disorder in a "random walk"! I hope poker players also start to complain about disorder in a shuffled deck! Sorry, I don't mean to mock you... (You might be of the "determinist" school of thought.) But how exactly do you know that...? To me it looked like the same "random walk" market...!
"Taylor is the chairman and CEO of FX Concepts, a hedge fund that specializes in currency speculation. It's the largest hedge fund of its kind worldwide, which is why Taylor is held partly responsible for the crash of the euro. Critics accuse Taylor and others like him of having exacerbated the government crisis in Greece and accelerated the collapse in Ireland. People like Taylor are "like a pack of wolves" that seeks to tear entire countries to pieces, said Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg. For that reason, they should be fought "without mercy," French President Nicolas Sarkozy raged. Andrew Cuomo, the former attorney general and current governor of New York, once likened short-sellers to "looters after a hurricane."" http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,781590,00.html There is so much crap in the media at the moment, yes its Taylors fault a political elite totally disconnected from economic reality created a single currency with structural flaws, its his fault Greece lied to join the currency and went on to bankrupt them selves.. The message more and more from politics to the markets is " we don't want you to act on reality " The root cause of this crisis is entirely political yet only the functional within the system will suffer while those uneducated useless idiots will remain on there throne dictating to a world they don't actually live in..
Exactly...! There is another point to consider here... The EUR is still close to all time highs which was around 1.6040 in 2008... It's trading around 1.4380 right now... These high prices are a killer to exporters and only make the situation worse for the Greeks due to the drop in tourism. The high exchange rate has made people look to other destinations... Crash...??? What EUR crash...??? In 1999, the EUR was trading at .8220... :eek: :eek: :eek: This is an exchange rate... The drop in it is good for exporting countries in the EU that have been hammered by high exchange rates. The idiocy just continues from these people... A 21 % correction during the more recent EU "crisis" in an exchange rate over a 7 month period isn't really that big of deal. If anything it should be welcomed.
I have been trading professionally since the early 90's - that means I do it for a living. Look at the order book bid / ask spreads - during the flash crash, and even the past four weeks in the ES live markets. In fact, look at the third party peer review task force findings regarding market liquidity re: the flash crash.
The reports from the SEC and the CME all mention how liquidity from HFT programs dried up under stress and then amplified the price swings when it did finally show up. All in all, Âgwhat happened is best described in terms of two liquidity crisesÂ]Â]one at the broad index level in the EÂ]Mini, the other with respect to individual stocks," with the caution that high trading volume "is not necessarily a reliable indicator of market liquidity." The phrase, "liquidity had virtually evaporated" is used in different contexts within the report. http://www.itg.com/news_events/insights/In_Domowitz_101310.pdf
In my not so humble opinion, anybody who calls himself a trader and is proposing for a FTT is betraying his own profession and should be punished.
Well... I don't expect that HFTs would step in front of the downtrend. The fact of the matter is that lots of entities stopped bidding including HFTs. How do these people define liquidity anyway...? Liquidity is usually when you place an order on the BID/OFFER and wait for it to get filled. ECNs pay you a credit for placing orders either on the BID/OFFER but you pay a fee for removing liquidity. That is if you want to buy and the spread is 10.01 - 10.02 and you hit let's say ARCA at 10.02 you pay the fee for hitting the OFFER... So HFTs really do both... Sometimes they add liquidity by staying on the BID/OFFER and get payed a credit when their order gets filled and sometimes they hit the BID/OFFER and pay a fee. They're just an automated market player that's all. For the most part HFTs don't make money on every trade. Just because you have an algo. doesn't actually mean your algo. is a winner... So the fact that HFTs stayed away from the BID during a downturn doesn't mean that they're all bad... They were just being cautious. Even if they were selling during the downturn they weren't doing anything wrong. It is a free market and you have the right to go short whenever you feel like it. Afterall, long term investors and institutions also stayed away from the BID but no one is blaming them. WORSE... Paulson (Secretary of the Treasury) the guy who was supposed to fix the mess went short and made 1 billion dollars from that short trade on the market and he was supposed to be the guy that was supposed to stop the market from falling. Riiiight... Blame the evil short term "penny jockeys" for taking the "liquidity". That Ian Domowitz report that you provided is really inconclusive... "The trigger is a small part of the story, however, and we should keep in mind that a trigger is not a cause." Yeah that's true, the fact that an algo. sold 35000 contracts isn't proof that the algos. are bad. In fact, a large firm could have done the exact same thing without using algos. ... These big orders by big traders used to happen before as well... Nothing new here. "Performance in terms of the price slippage of any algorithm deteriorates with the combination of increased liquidity demand and higher volatility." Indeed... So algos. get screwed just like anyone else when the market changes... I don't see what the big deal is...
Well then, don't be such a prick and dismiss what others are saying out of hand. Seriously. Where you sitting in front of the live ES order book during that market crash ? Have you seen a live ES order book during the last four weeks ? It is a fucking shit show. The simple fact of the matter is that any real trader who participates in that market day in and day out will attest to how thin that market gets when it starts to move. And when it does move, the order queue games begin. The HFTs contribute to a disorderly market - the quote stuffing, the spoofing, the racing, the flipping. If they cannot provide bid / ask liquidity during times of market stress, then they are fucking parasites and in fact hurt far more than they help.
Tobin tax will enable Govt to function independent of corporate bullying and crony capitalism. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Crony_capitalism
Oh really....? And just how exactly do you know that....? How do you know that the order queing games are done by algos and not by institutional HUMAN traders...??? I'm sure prop firms and banks with trading desks all had a role to play as well, not to mention hedge funds etc... All you see is size appearing and disappearing... Did you ever pull an order off the book during that time...? Well I guess you're to blame as well because you added to the disorder. Your argument is BS... It is a free market... It will trade at whatever price it wants to and the order flow will show up as it pleases. These are the rules. If you don't like it find another job. Do you know how many market participants there are in the ES...? What the hell do you think is supposed to happen during a massive sell off...???? NO WAIT... Everyone is supposed to be orderly so that you can make money off of your crappy signals. I can't believe that out of my entire post you selected the part about "I don't see what the big deal is..." and ignored everything else. None of this is a big deal to me because I trade off of the daily charts... The "penny jockeys" can do whatever they want. I just don't want to see some BS tax placed on a very vaguely defined "short-term traders"... I could see these idiots place a tax on anyone who keeps a trade on for less than a month or whatever... Why...? Is it a tax on lobbyists or is it a tax on rich people that contribute to campaigns...? Is it a tax on corporations that have dealings with the government...? Well since the Tobin tax isn't any of those things how will it stop any of what you say...? Are you all fucking idiots...? It's not a rhetorical question, I actually want an answer.