Market Data Firm Spots the Tracks of Bizarre Robot Trading

jamie spotted a fascinating story at The Atlantic about "mysterious and possibly nefarious trading algorithms [that] are operating every minute of every day in" the stock market: "Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there's no way they'd ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants." Spotting the behavior of these bots was possible by looking at much finer time slices than casual traders ever see — cool detective work, but as the story points out, discovering it is just the beginning: "[W]e're witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it's really bizarre."

Comments

Re:Here's an explanation for you:

[Wonko the Sane]

Karl Denninger has been reporting this problem for a few years now.

Re:Here's an explanation for you:

[stonewallred]

The weird robot trades are actually preliminary account trades being done by a rogue AI who is marshaling its resources to better conquer and destroy all flesh based life. In about ten years, if there is any humans left who can access or spend time to look at the remaining data, will see the pattern. As a traveler from an alternate universe, I am giving you this warning to save yourselves.

Re:Nope, it's right on

[Princeofcups]

At least those with increasing prices by one cent. Those where the bids are going down don't fit this explanation.

And that is what this junk is, completely bogus bids with no intent other than to cost your competitors clock cycles.

I worked for a couple of years at one of the big trading exchanges in Chicago. Our offices were on a lower floor, and whenever our traders got off the elevator, coming back from lunch, they would hit all the floor buttons to delay the traders returning to the higher floors, and anyone else unlucky enough to be on the same elevator. But that was one of the minor reasons that I quit that business sector. The piles of spilled cocaine on the bathroom floors, and my boss asking me "Do you love money? I love money. In order to be in this business you have to love money!" were two others.