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Stock Market Manipulation By Millisecond Trading
cfa22 writes "Nice piece in the NY Times today on ultra-fast trading on the NYSE and other markets. The 'algos' that make autonomous trading decisions have to be fast, but I wonder: Is network speed ever a bottleneck? Can anyone with inside experience with millisecond trading provide some details for the curious among us regarding hardware architectures and networking used for such trading systems?" According to the article, high-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year.
In one or two decades we might be able to let all the stock trading to be done by the machines while we focus on doing the non-specialized work ourselfs! Ow wait... wasn't it supposed to go the other way around?
I believe that precision millisecond stock trading globally is the real reason behind the IEEE 1588v2 precision time protocol. The cisco 9000 enterprise switch supports it. Support has been lacking in smaller switches. The only other group using PTPv2 is the cell phone industry.
The interesting part of PTPv2 for me is that it is used in the 802.1AS protocol ( http://www.ieee802.org/1/pages/802.1as.html ) which is one of the foundations of Audio Video Bridging (AVB) http://www.ieee802.org/1/pages/avbridges.html - Which allows for real time low latency low jitter media streams transported via ethernet with guaranteed bandwidth.
Just yesterday I was joking with friends: Forget about stealing the rounded pennies from bank accounts, criminals could re-program the PTPv2 implementation in switches to steal milliseconds of time during trading!
Anyways, back on the original question, no, network speed is not so crucial once all of your packets are properly timestamped.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
I interviewed at a millisecond (market-making) trading firm in Chicago. They claimed that when a hedge fund, etc. would buy or sell a stock, that one large purchase or sale would typically signal another. Whichever firm could get their quote up the fastest would make the buy or sale, and it's a winner-take-all system. The first market-maker to adjust their price would benefit. Thus, server speed is THE essential bottleneck. Needless to say, they keep the location of their server a secret.
Ultra fast trading is an interesting idea and done right it can lead to successful short term returns, but if you take a Ferrari around a hairpin at 120mph, you're still going to hit the wall and die.
Here's what happens when that particular Ferrari hits the wall:
http://tech.slashdot.org/tech/08/09/10/203233.shtml
My reading of the article brought out the point that, for a few extra bucks, you can actually go to the head of the line - giving the window of opportunity to perform the other actions described. Interesting definition of "free market" ...
A firm I worked with recently tore down an arbitrage network (they were getting out of the business as it was not core) which comprised of a great deal of Layer 2 dark fiber between sites in NYC and an external data center in NJ, Force 10 fabric switches with multiple paths to server clusters, and a great many Sun X-series servers running Linux. This arbitrage network bypassed the standard corporate (i.e. Cisco-based) network as they wanted exclusivity, higher bandwidth and as much speed as possible. Still, there were issues and the whole environment was scrapped since the actual returns did not match the expectations or cover the costs.
When I looked over the shoulders of the designers (they didn't want too much support from the regular network engineering team) they were concerned with raw performance and not as much with security or other daily operational issues. I would characterize it as the difference between, say, a NASCAR Sprint Cup car and your regular transportation. The former is purpose-built solely for performance while the other has to contend with safety requirements, daily functionality, and a lower common denominator for use.
I think, therefore I am - Rene Descartes; I yam what I yam, an' that's what I yam - Popeye
Can someone explain to me the benefit to society of this kind of activity? I get how the stock market is beneficial, generally allocating resources according to the merit of the business ventures involved, investing capital where it will produce goods/services/jobs, and so on. So despite being a social lefty, I'm not anti-capitalism or anti-stock-market; it has risks and flaws but it works. But how does this kind of stock trading benefit anyone other than the traders themselves?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Allston Trading occasionally speaks at my university, and they've said that network bandwidth can be a big bottleneck. They needed to install servers across the street from the NYSE to attain the edge they needed.
As far as who the profits go to, ALlston (and I suspect many similar organizations) keeps most of their profits internal, and exercise big profit-sharing programs for their employees. It's actually quite an interesting idea, as this group of almost entirely Computer Scientists are using their expertise to make some good money as a cell in an atmosphere dominated mostly by business-types.
As someone who works with people who do this, I can tell you they spend a lot of money on very powerful machines, and then try to place said machines within walking distance of the exchange's computers. I have been told that running a server at the office is too slow, even if its in the same city. Also, millisecond is the wrong word. Their trading is measured more closely in microseconds.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
The problem is the start-up cost. Buying the necessary hardware, obtaining the required data sources, developing the necessary analytical formulas and coding them efficiently costs a *lot* of money. So it's the free market of people who already have a lot of money and time, or simply an enormous amount of money.
I'm not entirely against it in some cases; well implemented it can smooth out market fluctuations and value securities more accurately. But it still makes me squeamish: It's yet another mechanism by which the rich get richer, and the poor get left behind. Every trade a "normal" person makes will end up costing a small amount more, and the difference goes into the pocket of the HF funds. It feels very much like the "shave the fractional cents off interest calculations" scam: No one suffers individually suffer, but it still feels wrong.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
In theory it adds liquidity to the market and reduces trading costs for other players.
Also, many of the successful trades will be based on having better information than the market price (over time, it would be very difficult to have much success by being lucky, especially with multiple automatic systems active), the execution of those trades makes the market price more accurate.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I suppose that's the same guys that are always getting the "first post" on /.
I work in the finance industry, and know a few things about this business. It can be very profitable indeed. Since the HF trades are typically finished at the end of each day (or even minute), they are not required to hold much cash (capital) to support their positions. Thus the business is unusual in the finance world for making a profit on, essentially, zero capital. Of course, it costs a lot of money to stay in the arms race.
The article hints at two kinds of HF strategies, and they really are distinct. First, there are the "rebate" strategies that collect those credits for providing markets. Then, there are the "predatory" strategies that try to find the price points of buyers and sellers as described. Other HF strategies include pairs trades (Exxon goes up so RIG will soon), inter-exchange arbitrage where a stock is traded on multiple exchanges, and index arbitrage such as trading the elements of the S&P 500 against the index futures (which has been around almost forever).
Other algorithmic trading includes strategies meant to take on positions slowly (or quickly) and efficiently. A famous old category are the Volume Weighted Average Price (VWAP) strategies that try to trade a little bit at a time throughout the day, so that the average trade price is close to the day's average. Other algos try to take advantage of mean reversion or trends during the day.
There is huge demand for technical people in this industry (I probably get one headhunter call every two weeks), almost all of it in NYC or Chicago. There's demand for network engineers, statisticians, programmers, and traders, and high pay for quality. Surprisingly few programmers these days are really acceptable to the business, because the code has to be so fast and efficient, and almost no one studies that any more.
Most exchanges aim for that kind of speed now, but fail to make it. Some of them, like the London Stock Exchange, http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_abandon_failed_windows_platform, which made the idiotic mistake of relying on Windows Server and SQL Server, don't even come close to delivering that kind of performance.
For those that come closest, the servers tend to be transaction-optimized RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Solaris. The networks are fiber optic-based. While they may connect to the Internet, the core systems, like those provided by AboveNet, are usually private 10GBe networks. In short, to really take advantage of this kind of high-speed trading you're not going to be doing this from your basement. You need to have a trading station either co-located at the market, or just down the street on a high-speed network no more than a link or two from the exchange's servers.
And, yes, network speed does matter here. So does server, storage and DBMS access speed.
Needless to say, none of the exchanges are exactly forthcoming about what their particular magic technology formula is since being able to deliver high-speed trading consistently has become an important sales point. I know many traders on Wall St. and the City in London who will move from one Exchange to another based purely on their ability to deliver faster trades. For this group, what's being traded is besides the point. It's all about keeping an edge in trading speed over their competitors.
Steven
Humans don't make the purchases or sales. The algorithms trade on their own, all the humans do is define the mechanism to evaluate trades and set limits (to ensure a bug or an unusual market movement doesn't get out of control).
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
To a previous commenter. The companies doing high frequency trading "are" the brokers. They aren't paying any brokerage fees because they have direct access to the market. Additionally speed is important enough that your computers need to be at least in the same physical vicinity as the trading computers. Literally every millisecond makes a difference. One of the things explained in the article is because the computers are so fast they can issue and cancel an order before it gets fulfilled. So with the Intel example: Notice there is a large buying trend in Broadcom Issue at x and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel. Issue at x+1 and see if there is a match. When a match is found immediately cancel. Repeat until a match isn't found. Place a huge sell order at the final number a match was found. PROFIT Basically the company made a .4% profit in a few seconds on 1.8 million by doing nothing but taking advantage of proximity to the market. This runs against several of the ideas around how an exchange is supposed to work. By the way... if I remember the match correctly that small .4% profit? It becomes huge when you consider this is done every second of every day. All that money those big firms are sucking up are coming from the small investor. The question is what is there to do about it? It will kill any small time daytrader. Someone like me who buys and holds will be alright but man forget trying to trade minute by minute based on technicals.
This kind of activity is an abuse of the free stock market system.
This activity does not generate wealth. It doesn't create something from nothing. And it doesn't add value to society. If they generated 21 billion, then 21 billion was necessarily lost by others.
People should look down on this kind of business and method of trading.
This is an outstandingly bogus article, what happens when arts graduates attempt to understand anything except celebrity gossip.
>It is the hot new thing on Wall Street,
The first algotrading I encountered was in the early 1990s at Deutsche, and they senior guys there told me of some of the mid80s stuff they'd done.
Not new.
>a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market,
Although algotrading is not exactly mass market, it is about as exclusive an activity as getting drunk.
>peek at investorsâ(TM) orders
That's not algotrading.
>and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices.
A major topic in algotrading is actually market impact modelling, ie working out how to make prices move less when they trade.
>Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency >trading is one answer.
Actually they're working out how to employ these guys since they've often been shafted by the GS bonus scheme.
>software that a federal prosecutor said could âoemanipulate markets in unfair waysâ â" it only added to the mystery.
He was fed this line by GS as part of a dispute over an algotrader's pay. There is no suggestion that GS was being "unfair", just addressing the issues caused by GS having an inferior tech infrastructure for AT than may competitors.
>"This is where all the money is getting made,â said William H. Donaldson".
I'd love to see the original quote before editing. Bet it was a lot less sexy.
>For most of Wall Streetâ(TM)s history, stock trading was fairly straightforward:
For an arts graduate the writer is terribly ignorant of history, as well as trading.
For instance is he not aware of how the Kennedy family got rich as part of causing the crash of 1929 ?
>Joseph M. Mecane of NYSE Euronext, which operates the New York Stock Exchange. âoeMarkets need liquidity, and high-frequency traders provide opportunities for other investors to buy and sell.â
It's more complex than that. Some ATs are consumers of liquidity, others provide it, and there exist models that imply that heavy AT activity drives liquidity away.
>Average daily volume has soared by 164 percent since 2005, according to data from NYSE. Although precise figures are elusive,
164% is a surprisingly "precise" figure, which PR bunny fed that to him ? Wonder why the PR wouldn't give more ?
>"The result is that the slower-moving investors paid $1.4 million for about 56,000 shares, or $7,800 more than if they had been able to move as quickly as the high-frequency traders."
That's really quite amazingly precise. So precise that I believe not a word of it.
Edit/Delete Message
Dominic Connor,Quant Headhunter
GS sees both the buy order and the sell order.
They can sell before large sell orders. Then buy again after to avoid a loss.
They can buy before large buy orders. Then sell right after to take a gain.
It's called front running and it's illegal.
But the government is not enforcing the law.
My theory is they are letting illegal activity go on to hold up the market prices.
I could be paranoid. But I've been in this thing for 28 years now and I've never seen such goofy market behavior and repeated evidence of price manipulation at market close on thin volume-- and yet there are no investigations.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
In this case, that is not quite what 'liquidity' means. When you discuss 'the liquidity of assets' you're generally referring to how easily and cost effectively those assets can be converted into cash or other, spendable assets. However, liquidity of a stock/bond/credit in this context is referring to how much that market is actively being traded. A liquid market is constantly moving, an non liquid market is stagnant. Theoretically, the more liquid a market is, the closer it's price is to its actual market value. This is related to the other kind of liquidity, as if you have an investment in a stagnant market, it would be very difficult to sell and turn into cash, but in a financial market context, that's not really what they're referring to.
But we now have clear evidence that the real cost to society of these behaviors is not in billions but in trillions of dollars.
It's like ignoring the price of having the U.S. Army all over the world protecting oil interests in the real price of oil.
The average bonus on WS less than a year after these companies were going bankrupt was over half a million dollars.
Corporations have been hijacked by the executive class for their own benefit- not societies benefit.
Lay 6,000 people off and get a 100,000,000 dollar bonus. But you can only buy 5 or 6 tv's and 3 or 4 cars. So overall demand for product is reduced.
I now have 4 friends laid off and three who are on the edge of being laid off. These are college educated folks with 10 year's experience.
When are we going to stop all this behavior by 2% of the population which is hurting the other 98%?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Thought I'd chime in on this. I have a trading account with $150K+ in it, and my per transaction costs are extremely low (I trade futures though, YMMV when it comes to equities, commodities, etc). The provider I use exposes an API that I can interact against to directly execute trades (although, you're always going to be fighting the speed of light). I wrap around this API with Python and Postgresql. If you're smart and your algorithms are rock solid, you can do well (I don't have to work if I don't want to). On the other hand, you have to make sure a human is *always* in the loop somewhere, otherwise you end up with the United Airlines fiasco someone pointed out above.
All you needed to stop were the bailouts. The behavior at that point would have corrected itself since many of these companies would have been out of business.
>But how does this kind of stock trading benefit anyone other than the traders themselves?
How does any trading benefit anyone but the trader themselves? This high frequency trading issue is a moot point. There is nothing sinister about it. What bothers people is that a few are doing it and making oodles of money. I work in this industry and have worked at investment banks where you do high speed trading. But now I work at a hedge fund and we just avoid it. It is an arms race and what bothers people right now is that there is a break in technology capability.
I am not kidding here. I know for a fact a few houses have been able to get micro-second trades, whereas the rest of the industry is still dealing in milli-second trades. Thus what is happening is that some very very big houses are getting whalloped in a major way. Hence the sour grapes...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
It goes like this. For a given security there are two prices the BID (what you're willing to pay for more of a stock) and the ASK (what you're willing to sell some of the stock you already have for). Most normal folks have only one up at any given time, you're either buying or selling. Then, if a BID equals an ASK you've got a trade.
There are entities in the market known as "market makers" who do both at the same time, however. They're usually not in the market to load up on a stock or unload their stock, so they try to balance the number of orders filled on a given security by raising their ask or dropping their bid in order to maintain equilibrium. Let's look at an example of an inefficient market without adequate liquidity. Let's say there's only one market maker -- he might bid $1.00 but ask $10.00, and clean up on anyone who tries to do business in his market.
So my hypothetical firm sees this huge gap and says, "Sweet. Let's start making market in here as well!" -- and I pad my bid a little bit, say $1.05 and shave a bit off the ask, call it $9.95. All of a sudden the original market maker is cut out - none of their bids end up buying stock, none of their asks end up selling it. So they decide to close the gap even further. 1.10 and 9.90. My firm doesn't like getting cut out of this sweet action so we close the gasp further and you have an arms race towards price discovery where the gap between the bid and the ask are separated by a very narrow margin, constantly being adjusted by what actual demand for the security is like.
Having multiple folks providing liquidity in the market means when you decide you're going to load up on STCK because you think their new product launch is going to do good things for the company your orders are unlikely to drive up the price very much so you can enter the position without paying a big premium to do so. Likewise, a year later you decide you're satisfied with your profits and are ready to exit the position. In a market without this liquidity selling your stock would drive down the price further and cut into your profits on that side.
Efficient price discovery is the purpose of the market. Liquidity is essential to that end. Traders provide that liquidity and, overall, the market benefits because of it.
I think your question speaks (to me at least) of a more basic question. Do all actions have to be to benefit 'others' in your opinion? I think most actions most people take, are soley to benefit themselves....especially where money/wealth is involved. I don't see anything wrong with that...but, it almost sounds like you do?
Are you implying that nothing really should be allowed to happen unless it benefits society as a whole rather than a single or few individuals?
Just curious...your question just really struck me strangely what what I thought I heard in it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You're confusing volatility with market liquidity. A market that's very liquid has lots of trades, so the value of a security (i.e. the most recent sale price) is always known and up-to-date. It doesn't have to be a volatile market to be liquid. For example, the market for government securities is very liquid, but if interest rates are stable it's also very non-volatile. (And even when it's "volatile" it's not volatile like a tech stock.) Needless to say an asset in a liquid market is typically easy to sell and convert into cash, which is the other definition of liquid.
The housing market is non-liquid. There have been only a half-dozen houses sold in my neighborhood over the last three years, and none of those houses is quite like mine. So nobody knows exactly what my house is worth. "Appraisers" are just professional educated guessers, who try to use judgment and experience to replace the pricing information provided by a liquid market. And as we've seen, a non-liquid market can be very volatile. Also, a house is a non-liquid asset; even a simple house sale to a family member takes weeks and hundreds of dollars to arrange.
But there are some securities (private placements, for one example) that trade very rarely. There actually are appraisers for these types of securities, because with so little trading activity the market price can become stale. These are very non-liquid markets. But as long as you can find a buyer and are willing to accept the buyers price they're no less liquid than IBM stock. You sell them, the trade clears, you get cash the next day. So they're liquid assets (more liquid than a house, in any case). And it's not even meaningful to talk about volatility in these markets because there is so little trade activity.
Amen to that brother.
What they did is going to make it happen again within the next 20 years instead of the next 60 years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sometimes you have to remind people that *everyone* is touchable.
Deleted
We did trading similar to this a few years ago, though we used a simple, pure-arbitrage strategy. We were trading the morning of 9/11 (pre market-open - the market never opened that day), and didn't pull the plug when the news hit. We were actually testing feasibility, and had not yet installed our server in a rack in Manhattan. My partner was trading (actually, "overseeing" is a better term) in a day-trading room about 30 miles N of NY. (Later we moved our server to the same building as the Island ECN, which at the time owned the ITCH technology mentioned in the article.). Everyone in the room stopped trading, their jaws dropped, staring at the monitor in the corner. BTW, the consensus in that room that day was that the market was not going to re-open. EVER.
My partner, though, is sitting in the back of the room, trading away (or, watching the computer trade away), wearing headphones, which already had the other guys suspicious. (The headphones didn't have soothing music, but vocalized order flow information - it was too fast to keep up with visually. My partner did have to intervene when things went awry, and the headphones told him when he needed to act or if things were humming along nicely.)
I figured later that we did about 5% of the pre-market NASDAQ trades that morning.
This gave me some consternation for some time. We made a bundle that morning, and the subsequent increased market volatility was the start of a winning streak. We did thousands of trades a day, and simply did not have losing days. Was there a purpose or value to our trading?
I eventually concluded "yes". We provided market liquidity when it was sorely lacking. The people who sold to us at, say, .50 outside of the market would have sold to somebody else at $1.00 outside of the market had we not been there as a counter-party. We stood there catching hot knives and handing them off, while providing the benefit of a quick and certain sale. This helped reduce spread and volatility.
Indeed, over the next couple of years, our typical profit/share shrunk from .10-.50 to 1-2 pennies, and competitors entered the market and the war of technological escalation started.
Now, as for the "flash orders", which apparently started last year, I don't see the benefit of that to the market. It just front-running in exchange for a fee paid for the privilege.
On the way down, the desperate management strips as much out as they can, in self-awarded bonuses and by running as much of the inbound cashflow through - extracting more money from other corporations so that they are damaged - and constraining outbound. The end result is more collapse and economic suffering, not less.
The alternative to this law-of-the-jungle, Libertarian no-tax, no-fed-money "ideal" is progressive taxation. It's an existing mechanism for inhibiting John Galt from excessive, unwarranted greed, and it can be used to redistribute wealth in a directed fashion. For example, to fund a health care system that provides health care for all. Western civilization would still be a good idea.
What you are describing is the market before these high frequency trading systems were developed. Everyone has access to the same information, they process it to make a decision on the current and projected value of a stock, and they place orders accordingly. Moving from the ancient floor and telephones to an electronic system with internet brokers increased the speed of the system and the number of players. And these high frequency trading systems do the same thing, but they do something else as well.
1) They use speed and volume to muscle in on traders who have performed their analysis and placed their orders and take a portion of the profits the slower traders may have acquired through their analysis and order. They didn't add liquidity, efficiency or even set the market price, they are simply stepping in between the buyers and sellers and creating multiple unnecessary trades to ensure a portion of the profits from those trades end up in their pockets.
2) And the systems are used to manipulate the pricing of stocks by placing fake orders that are removed before the orders can be acted upon because there was no intent to buy or sell in the first place, just to put some numbers on a board to force a reaction.
What it comes down to is you have a small group that have created a shadow market of orders that most traders never see and the use of systems to place and remove bogus orders on the real market to manipulate prices. I have watched NASDAQ level 2 quotes over the years and it has reached the point where today they are meaningless as the orders you think you see are not a reflection of the true orders hiding in the shadows and you can watch massive blocks of orders appear and vanish for no obvious reason as the stock price changes. In fact, I swear you can sometimes see orders flying back and forth as the high frequency trade systems of competitors wage a cyber trading battle on the open market. NASDAQ is actually paid to provide access to that information and it sure looks like its just a scam at this point.
Yes, no questions were answered.
"high-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year"
Many of those trades took money from the guy who comes home at night and trades for his 401K. With every winner in the stock market, there is a loser, and it is big banks like Goldman Sachs that are usually winners.
I suspect that talking about "market liquidity" is just avoiding the issue: The U.S. financial system is corrupt.
No, it doesn't.
I think our entire society (Except stock traders) would be a hell of a lot better off if you were required to own stock for six months.
People might actually start purchasing stock based on actual company performance. They'd start expecting to make money via dividends, aka, company profit, instead of random fluctuations in the price caused by CEO manipulation.
Like the CEO, oh, firing half the workforce to cause an upward stock price bump for two months, so they get their bonuses. Oh, and incidentally cripple the company, but what the fuck do they care, they're out the door to another company.
Stock ownership is company ownership. It is not a fucking bingo game. Although if that existed by itself, that would be fine...the problem is that the idiotic bingo games get play by the board, which starts operating the company for the benefit of the bingo game, instead, of, I dunno, the actual company.
As a lefty, I'll complain when companies put profits ahead of employees, but hell, they've stopped doing even that. At least that system worked somewhat. Make the workers too unhappy, abuse them too much, and you don't make as much money.
Now the people running the company are rewarded solely based on an idiotic bingo game, which bears no relationship to how much money the company makes. And it doesn't matter how much the workers abused, because the actual business of actually producing goods and services is irrelevant to the paycheck of the people at the top.
Until the entire company collapses, at which point they walk out the door with a shitload of money and head to another company, whose board will happily hire them because it will make their stock go up. Which they can sell to poor unsuspecting suckers, and walk away with a lot of money to pour into the next business, building it up as an actual industry, until they can hire a stock-pricing oriented CEO and suck all the cash out of that stock, too.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Supposedly, yeah. But the big trading houses are doing this. There is no way a human can do millisecond trading.
More like, eaten alive. How many little guys you know have the computing horsepower, software, and bandwidth of one of the major trading houses? Think your 4 GHz Intel box on a cheap DSL can outthink and outmanuever a couple networked Crays on the same T3 as the Exchange? Online trading is quite simply a good way to get eaten for lunch. All it's done is supply more suckers who have NO business in the stock market their opportunity to get bankrupted. And the market is ALWAYS hungry for more suckers. It's the only legal Ponzi scheme out there.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It's a bit under 10% as measured the new way created under clinton.
It's over 16% the way they measured it until then.
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data
And it's over 20% if you include people who have run out of benefits and people who used to make six figure incomes who "have a job" for a fraction of their former pay.
These are really historic times... the banks are refusing to take ownership of houses that should be foreclosed on. The banks are refusing to list houses they have foreclosed on to artificially pump prices. Cities are tearing down thousands of houses rather than let them sink to their true price (which may actually be zero anyway since without a job, you can't pay anything for a house).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.