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New "Circuit Breaker" Imposed To Stop Market Crash
Lucas123 writes "The SEC and national securities exchanges announced a new rule that would help curb market volatility and help to prevent 'flash crashes' like the one that took place on May 6, when the Dow dropped almost 1,000 points in a half hour. That crash was blamed in part on automated trading systems, which process buy and sell orders in milliseconds. The new rule would pause trading on individual stocks that fluctuate up or down 10% in a five-minute period. 'I believe that circuit breakers for individual securities across the exchanges would help to limit significant volatility,' the SEC's chairman said. 'They would also increase market transparency, bolster investor protection, and bring uniformity to decisions regarding trading halts in individual securities.'"
What happened on May 6th was that sell orders were present without matching buy orders for an instant, and that allowed some really wacky trades to complete... nearly every Dow and S&P 500 component was affected, and some ETFs even traded for a penny a share for that brief instant. Then when news got out that there was bargains to be had, the buy orders started showing up and things returned to a run-of-the-mill down day.
Now, the NYSE and NASDAQ have always had this circuit breaker rule that allowed them to call a "time out" where they wouldn't process orders in order to draw attention to the wacky situation and give all involved time to react. The problem is that these new "market centers" allow trades to be completed rapidly, but also without the same oversight rules. While the big exchanges had the time out in effect, orders simply routed around them and the wacky drop continued. So, now the SEC is taking the NYSE/NASDAQ rules and making them their rules, so all the new players have to observe the timeouts. That should fix this problem.
I'm so saddened by these stories about stock traders getting electrocuted. It was about time they added circuit breakers.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This is what happens when people who aren't competent in a field start dictating the activities in it.
How many legislators are Series 7 licensed? Series 66? 63? 6? Do any of these buffoons know how the market works? No floor also means no ceiling, there is no cap to how much an investor can make/lose.
This regulation will only strangle growth and innovation, slowing our economic recovery. But I guess it's easier to carry out a regulatory vendetta than it is to appreciate that the simple, universal truths of Austrian economics.
Exactly what harm are they trying to mitigate here? Volatility isn't a bad thing in and of itself. If the underlying value of the stock is there, the price will recover. If not, well, it needs to go down.
More and more the markets seem decoupled from reality. Why is it so hyper-urgent for a trade to complete in milliseconds, even if it means selling at rock-bottom price? Isn't that just really dumb programming?
Imposing a global circuit breaker seems like one way of fixing it... but why is the trading so frenetic in the first place? Why this absolute pressure to trade nownowNOW?
These are real companies people are betting on. Companies have lives in the years to decades, and at best their profits are measured in quarters - and even that's far too short-term thinking compared to human society, the biosphere and the ecological damage our industrial activities are doing.
There just isn't any meaningful data that can be generated about the activities of corporations on the millisecond scale. Not really any on less than a yearly scale, if you think about it. The biggest news right now is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and what's the timeline for fixing that? Weeks to months.
What does society actually gain from ultra-fast gambling on the markets? Other than a cheap thrill and massively increased risk?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Problem solved!
I do not have that kind of access to get rich off of other investors. The big boys should not be any different.
I am sick and tired of these guys playing with my own money as well as, pensioners, my grandmas, and my employers money. A single mistake effects me and everyone reading this while the traders get bonuses. Where do you think your money goes when you deposit it? It does not sit in the bank or go to loans to help small businesses anymore. It goes to risky trading where you lose and the CEO of your bank gets rich if they gamble it right.
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. . . but "circuit breakers" are not what is called for here. The market needs fuses. Not to be funny, but circuit breakers are too easily reset. Most trading is not done on the floor of the NYSE. If you want to stop trading AND get everybody's attention, then somebody needs to get burned. Otherwise, this breaker is going to go off, get reset, go off, get reset until it sounds just like chicken little. Think I am wrong? Well, the NYSE already has circuit breakers, since 1987. Notice that they do not get mentioned.
Sound the alarm but do not stop trading. Have traders be responsible for all price deviations from the time of the alarm until the 'crisis' is over. If they suddenly have to "cover the spread" then they will stop trading until they figure out what is wrong.
Just tax the fuck out of those speculative scumbags, that should reduce "volatility" a lot.
If you want to gamble, thats your business.
If you invest too much money in stocks, you don't diversify, and you loose your life savings on the stock market ... thats YOUR problem.
I have a really REALLY simple solution ... don't invest in the stock market if you can't deal with the consequences.
The stock market has no basis in reality. They like to pretend it does, but it doesn't. There are all sorts of excuses and 'reasons' why it does, but it has no more basis in reality than paper currency.
And yes, I think paper currency is retarded as well. When you're trading something that can be easily manufactured you are going to loose unless you're the guy who makes it.
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No, the best argument against it is that it allows automated front-running by allowing the high-frequency traders to issue and cancel small orders in quick succession to discover an ordinary buyers or seller's limit price, and then profiting by offering a sale that would have otherwise happened at a price more favorable to the initiator. To quote the link (which is highly recommended):
Are you adequate?
No, it's much worse than this. High frequency trading allows its practicioners to cheat, quite literally, as I pointed out in another comment that linked to this blog post.
When a buyer or seller places a limit order, their limit price is supposed to be a secret, and the market is supposed to deliver the best possible price for them relative to that limit. Flash trades and "immediate-or-cancel" orders allows high frequency traders to issue a flurry of really quick orders to discover a slower trader's limit price, and then trade at that limit instead of the price that the slower guy would have otherwise gotten.
So if ACME is trading at $26.10, slow buyer A enters a limit buy order for $26.40, and slow seller B enters a market sell order, the high speed trader is able to use really fast trades to discover A's $26.40 limit, buy B's shares at $26.10, and then sell them right away to A for $26.40, all before A can learn about B's more favorable sell offer and accept it.
Are you adequate?
I have a degree in Electronics Engineering and had to go through three courses on feedback systems and servomechanisms. What you are proposing may seem sensible, but that's not how nature works.
Feedback control systems can become unstable, but inserting delays into the feedback loop is about the *worst* thing you can do to destabilize them. If you want to stabilize a feedback system you should insert a "low pass" filter in the loop, not a delay.
A delay means that a lot of change will accumulate and suddenly be released. Putting a one day delay would mean that all the buy or sell orders would be stored hidden somewhere and then, all of a sudden, the market would become aware of that trend.
A low pass filter is, more or less, like a moving average. With a low pass filter, the market would get information on the average of the last X hours or days of transactions. That way everybody would be allowed to update instantly, to a microsecond precision if they wanted to, their estimates of the market trends, but those would not be instantaneous trends, they would be longer range.
Instead of limiting how fast market transactions can be done, it would be much better to limit the speed of the information on the system. Do not divulge *every* price for every transaction, but only the average of some period. This average can be updated every nanosecond if people want so, it will make no difference.
While I certainly agree that once-a-day is too strict, your example is very flawed. If Ford's 5 o'clock bankruptcy is public knowledge, then its price will be zero-ish now, because nobody's going to want to pay a high price for a company that goes bankrupt in the next few hours. If it's not public knowledge, then you'd be trading on insider information, which is fraud. So being able to trade a second time that day only helps you if crime helps you.
Are you adequate?
The stock market has no basis in reality. They like to pretend it does, but it doesn't. There are all sorts of excuses and 'reasons' why it does, but it has no more basis in reality than paper currency.
The first part of statement was wrong. Then when you said your bit about paper currency you confirmed the fact that you simply don't understand economics. Instead, you're another gold standard guy enthusiast. I'm going to explain to you why that's not a good thing.
The price of gold is set by the quantity of gold available and the demand for it, as is everything else. Since the total quantity of available gold isn't related at all to the production in any other industry, that's a really poor measure of the economic status of any one nation.
Paper currency is easily manufactured, but the guy who makes it isn't guaranteed to win anymore than everybody else is guaranteed to lose. It's called supply and demand. If you print too much of it, you have inflation, and the paper will soon be worth nothing. If you take money out of circulation, you have deflation, and the paper is worth more. Consequently, that's exactly the same situation you have with gold. If we start mining a whole lot of gold, the price of gold comes down and you can exchange it for less things. If you start producing less gold, the price goes up, and you can exchange it for more valuable things. The value of everything in relation to everything else is constantly fluctuating, and you don't make it "stable" or more "real" by having a mineral or a very difficult to manufacture thing as your currency. It's all the same. If we suddenly print ten times more money than we currently have available, assuming everything else stays the same, the cost of everything product will go up because the people with that extra money in hand will be willing to spend more, people's salaries will go up, because employees will demand more money to compensate for the increased price of goods, and now everything you could buy with a $1 bill you buy with a $10 bill. But it's ok, because your salary will have gone from $70,000 / year to $700,000 / year. It's exactly equivalent and no actual value was lost anywhere.
You can't fix greed with a software patch.
What the original poster means is that the brokers are, against fiduciary duty, siphoning money from their customers. Consider the following, very rough, case:
I'm Mr. Megabroker. A new multibillion dollar marketing campaign hits, and suddenly I have a ton of BUY orders for SLUSHO stock. I hold those orders for a split second and buy up SLUSHO, knowing that the ton of orders I hold will drive up the price. Once I secure my stocks, I submit my ton of buy orders after my own.
Suddenly, I'm sitting on a bunch of SLUSHO stock that's had a guaranteed jump in price. If I had executed my customer's orders immediately, that increase in price would have been theirs, not mine.
Baby Cloverfield hits Manhattan, and suddenly SLUSHO is radioactive waste. I get a ton of SELL orders. I dump my SLUSHO holdings before the ton of SELL orders hit, having perfect knowledge this is about to occur because I'm the one who's about to do it. I sell my SLUSHO when prices are still high. My customers bleed out.
I've made money coming and going for no other reason than I hold the orders in my pocket and therefore have perfect knowledge of the future. The money I make is not reflective of any real productivity, but is instead theft I can get away with by ignoring my fiduciary duties for a brief while.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
Hi,
Normally I would be content to sit by the sidelines but I'm jumping in just to clarify, there is a lot of misinformation swirling around this discussion, a lot of conjecture by smart people who really have little to no experience in high frequency trading which is rapidly becoming the new wall street boogeyman. HFT dramatically improves liquidity and price discovery. It has helped lead the way to more efficient markets, and for the most part helps stocks and various other instruments reach their "true" value faster than ever before.
There are a lot of whiners out there complaining about how HFT is somehow "not fair", while they continue to get taken to the cleaners by their brokers, the banks, and hundreds of other middle men. Why do you think the spreads are so tight on a lot of these markets? HFT. Believe me, the institutional brokers would like nothing better than to make very wide markets and charge you for the privilege. The vast majority of investors who are taking long term positions in the markets are not effected by intraday moves. If you got burned because you were trying to make a profit intraday then you got what was coming to you, because not only are you not as fast as most of the firms out there, but also not as smart. (sorry) Frankly if NYSE's attempt to "restore order" wasn't so entirely broken the price discrepency would have been even shorter lived. However, because of the steps their market took to restore order most savvy shops immediately routed around them in order to complete and start new transactions (as they should). Attempts to regulate the markets in this way will not work as expected, because they are introducing arbitrary rules which will largely be ignored by the really big players (dark pools anyone?). So far there has been no indication that the recent price drop was the result of an HFT strategy gone awry, but rather a temporary blip made worse because of an outdated mode of operation. I think an interesting experiment would be if all of the HFT shops pulled their liquidity (this would never happen), the results would be fairly disastrous for short term investors, unless you like getting worse prices.
Anyway, I don't want to rant any more. It is unfortunate that people aren't really looking at this from all angles. Competition is a good thing for everyone. It applies to Microsoft and Linux, but not the markets right? ...
I initially read about this in a news story where the SEC employee was bemoaning the fact that they had cases they wanted to pursue, but couldn't due to interference from above. He was screaming that they had caught all the major players pulling exactly this scam, but the best he could get his bosses to sign off on were minor fines that didn't even qualify as "a cost of doing business."
I don't think anyone of note on Wall Street has been afraid of the SEC for quite some time...
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."