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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."
This looks like high frequency traders have moved on from just gaming the market and now are trying for flood each other with bogus data hoping to trigger a bug in the competition's software or simply overwhelm it.
Its corewars, but with real money instead of simulated computer memory.
http://www.corewars.org/
The name of the game is to send a "signal" that confuses the other guys bots, such that you fool them into making you money.
Very much like aircraft radar guided missiles vs radar jammers vs anti-jamming missiles
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
They're obviously designed to manipulate trading volume in order to fuck with the church of technical analysis believers.
When you understand how the spread of ask/bid prices impact candlestick charts, and subsequently: the market's perception of bullish and bearish indicators, you can see how sinister this really is.
http://stockcharts.com/school/doku.php?id=chart_school:chart_analysis:introduction_to_candlesticks
I have a simple solution for problems that could be caused by these high-speed robots doing the trades, and also for eBay's 'sniping' problem (where your item sits for days untouched, and then the bids all land in the last thirty seconds).
Just add some 'fuzzy logic' to the time things happen. eBay auctions would randomly end 'between 10:05 and 10:10", forcing snipers to bid before the end of the trading. Same for the stock market, just have trades execute, by law, on a 'random' basis within a certain time period after they're filed. I'm not sure what the right balance between stability and liquidity is, but I'll guess that a two minute window would discourage most high-speed trading.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Back when I used to play MUDs, I remember setting up triggers in Gmud. I idly thought to myself, "What if I could do this with the stock market?"
Back when I used to play World of Warcraft, I remember all the auctionbots people would set up to automatically undercut you down to one copper over what was profitable. You could search for a specific item, see one person selling it for say, 1000 gold, put your item up for 990 gold, search for that item again, and see that all five of their items up for sale are now 989 gold and 99 silver. If you set it somewhere absurdly low like 500 gold, it would be bought out by a bot within seconds of posting it. Of course, after buying it, their prices were back to normal. Of course botting is illegal in World of Warcraft.
Again, I applied this thinking to the stock market. What if you had bots to buy if the price was favorable for very popular stocks, but they could manipulate the market to make the price favorable? This kind of manipulation can and will lead to some dire consequences as people no longer act predictably for fear of the bots manipulating them.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
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.
To use the face to face analogy, it's like two people trying to negotiate a deal when a third person comes up and starts screaming at one of the parties. While the subject is still recovering from being screamed at, the other parties make the same deal that the offended party was about to make.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Word.
Any trade where your purpose is to make money out of money seems pretty pointless to me. But I'm an engineer, so I certainly don't see the world the same way as a business/finance geek would. But as long as the finance geeks and politicos are jerking each other around, they're presumably not bothering anyone else (until they fuck shit up so much that it's time to tell them to go sit in the corner for a while).
Warren Buffet seems to have good investing advice I can appreciate.... invest in what you know; what you want to succeed, and do it for the long term. I can jive with that... then even if your investments lose money, it at least went to what you consider a worthy cause.
I put a portion of my savings into my company stock, because I want to show that I'm personally invested in my employer. I know it's not a good idea to put too much in there in case it tanks, in which case you'll be out of a job and a retirement. So I make sure most of the rest of my money is in a diversified index fund. Usually the index funds with low fees, because they don't perform all that worse than "managed" funds, and I don't care to reward the stock fund "managers" for being succeeding at being greedy.
I usually choose the international index funds, if only to promote peace through cross-investment. Also I think the US dollar will likely fall during my lifetime. And if it doesn't, well, then I've still got plenty of strong dollars in savings. Plus, most of the easy growth is probably in developing international markets anyway. I don't care to try to "win big" by catching the next Qualcomm or Apple, because they could probably succeed without my help, and they'd probably make most of their ill-gotten gain through means I don't approve, like patents and lawsuits and technological lockout.