NASDAQ Trading Halted Due To "Technical Issue"

barlevg writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that trading was halted midday Thursday due to an as-yet unnamed technical issue. Says SEC spokesperson John Nester, 'We are monitoring the situation and in are close contact with the exchanges.'"

Comments

Hello tech support?

[Sponge Bath]

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re:Hello tech support?

[gforce811]

"3 times... You always tell me to do it 3 times."

- The Website Is Down (http://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE)

Re:Hello tech support?

[605dave]

You have to restart it while holding down the option key. That will flush the cash.

Re:Hello tech support?

[UnknowingFool]

I don't know what you mean. It's working for me. [Unplugs coffee maker, plugs server back in]. --BOFH

Re:Hello tech support?

[newcastlejon]

Don't liquid assets flow away by themselves? Maybe one of the slush funds has congealed in the outlet.

MUAHAHAHAHA

[GameboyRMH]

Does this make anyone else happy for some reason?

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[SuricouRaven]

Schadenfreude.

I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it. The higher echelons of finance are so many layers of abstraction away from what the common people deal with, it's hard to fit the two ends together.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[lgw]

I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it. The higher echelons of finance are so many layers of abstraction away from what the common people deal with, it's hard to fit the two ends together.

This isn't about some mysterious "higher echelons of finance ". The majority of Americans own stock, directly or though 401k or pension plans. Before the 2008 crash is was nearly 2/3s. And yet many people are in the same boat as you.

I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement.

Just like there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how cars work before you can drive safely - not all that much, but there are a several hours about it in most drivers ed classes - there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how markets and investments work. Where's the public education for that? Are we so intent on class warfare that we'll cut off our nose to spite our face here?

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[tgd]

Does this make anyone else happy for some reason?

Only people whose total understanding of global economics comes from things they've read on Slashdot.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[msauve]

"I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*."

Think of it this way. It's like Las Vegas. Except it's legal everywhere and there's less oversight to keep people honest. Oh, and if you are dishonest, they just take back a portion of your ill-gotten gains, instead of breaking your legs.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[Billly Gates]

I'm not even sure what the stock market *does*. I don't think many people do. Including the people who run it. The higher echelons of finance are so many layers of abstraction away from what the common people deal with, it's hard to fit the two ends together.

This isn't about some mysterious "higher echelons of finance ". The majority of Americans own stock, directly or though 401k or pension plans. Before the 2008 crash is was nearly 2/3s. And yet many people are in the same boat as you.

I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement.

Just like there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how cars work before you can drive safely - not all that much, but there are a several hours about it in most drivers ed classes - there's a certain minimum amount you need to know about how markets and investments work. Where's the public education for that? Are we so intent on class warfare that we'll cut off our nose to spite our face here?

Yeah, that was before people discovered. Now everyone is doing it and these companies can not grow anymore and no more investors will come in to boost the shareprice.

Shit most do not even pay dividends anymore! That is a terrible buy if you ask me. That is like me selling you a vacation home where I keep all the rent money and you get nothing. Would you agree to such a deal even after you buy it?! Hell no. ... but don't worry Johhny down the street just may buy it so you can still get rich ... wink wink.

Now it is Gold and bitcoins. As more people buy them the value goes up. Yes, this is gambling. The more someone learns about the stock market the more they will see how rich computer trading high frequency traders steal your money and how overvalued some of these companies are. In the old days more stocks meant these companies could use the cash to buy more factories to make more money and you would see it every quarter as a solid 30 year investment.

Today it is traded in 1/10000th of a second by scammers and the traders still pay themselves pre financial deregulation like it is their money for compensation rather than yours. You are getting rob unless you know what the hell you are doing.

There are other investments that pay more today and unless these companies can grow why invest. The pre-IPO new guys starting out you say? Well the investors get the same shares for 1/4th the price before it hits the market. It is inflated on opening day. You simply can not win these hustlers.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[ah.clem]

Why not spend some time reading, then? It's not rocket science, and like it or not, this is how the game works. To remain ignorant to how wealth is generated in this country is to give up. Time and something as simple as dollar cost averaging $10-$20 a week in extremely low risk mutuals could get you a better future life than bitching about "Elitists" and sticking your money in a mattress (or blowing it all on crap every month). The market is comprised of "common people" investing for a better future. The only person stopping you is you. Just my opinion.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[edibobb]

No, derivatives (such as mortgage backed securities) and options are constructs by high-class insecure gambling addicts. While you can gamble on the stock market, but most people (and institutions) use it for investment, or long-term bets. One notable difference between a casino and the stock market is that in the stock market, the odds are in the your favor.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[ErichTheRed]

"I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education. And it's important to know the basics, since it will likely affect your standard of living in retirement."

I agree, but I can also see the other side of it. Way back before technology made it possible to do day trading or HFT, it was actually a market that most educated people could get their heads around. And if you're a Buffett-style "value investor" who picks good companies and hangs onto stocks for a long time, a lot of the noise is still filtered out. But, I do think that online trading, instant access to information and cheap trades contribute to volatility. Volatility filters back to the average investor in the form of their account balance wildly swinging up and down for reasons that aren't 100% clear to them.

Some examples:
Investment buy decision process, old school: "Hmm, the WSJ basically reprinted an IBM press release showing new and exciting products. I think I will buy 100 shares of the company and see where it goes. I will call my broker in the morning and pay $100 in fees, then I will own and hold these shares to see if they increase in value."
Investment buy decision process, new school: "OMG, my trading platform's tech sector chart just blinked a brighter shade of green, looks like IBM is in play. Click, buy 100 shares IBM, 85 shares CSCO, 62 shares MSFT, 90 shares RHAT all for $7.95 or free if I trade hundreds of times a month."

Investment sell decision process, old school: "Hmm. the WSJ article I just read says IBM isn't keeping up with competitors. I've made a bit of money on this over the last 10 years, time to sell. Let's call the broker in the morning and maybe I'll do some research on where else to put the profits."
Investment sell decision process, new school: "OMG, IBM missed their quarterly earnings by one cent. Wow, they suck. Sell sell sell! Twitter, "OMG, #IBM is #toast, get out now!!!!!' Stock message boards, "Smart money is in Cisco." Facebook: "Selling my IBM shares now, suggest you do the same." Wow, IBM is down 25% for the day, I wonder why?

If I were running a company that didn't need access to capital that only the stock market would bring, I'd never go public even if it meant Easy Street for me forever. Once a company does that, they will NEVER have control over anything they do.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[lgw]

Volatility filters back to the average investor in the form of their account balance wildly swinging up and down for reasons that aren't 100% clear to them.

It has ever been thus. If anything, volatility is quite constrained now by historical standards. Markets have always been driven first by rumor and fashion, and only distantly by fundamentals. It was worse in 1913, and worse still in 1713.

What's changed is that now most of us have a reason to care, and should have been taught stuff like this.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[ebno-10db]

I think this is a terrible problem with education in America. People are afraid of the market, don't understand it, don't want to understand it, but that's due to simple lack of education.

It's not due to lack of education, but due to the simple fact that the stock market really is scary, and that's exacerbated by the fact that people have less faith in our basic financial institutions than they used to.

The stock market is scary because it can swing up and down wildly. The only sound advice for most people (myself included) is that over the long term (decades) it almost always has a better yield than other investments. Buy some low cost index stocks and hang on to them. If you think you can do better than that, you better make sure it's not just vanity, or a few lucky outcomes feeding your confirmation bias. Very few people can beat the market with pick and choose. Timing? Even Warren Buffett avoids that. He's a long term value investor, but really doing that well takes serious research (that's what he and Charlie do all day).

It doesn't help that people have lost faith in our basic financial institutions either. I don't think that rationally applies as much to the stock market. HFT raises a lot of eyebrows (likely for good reason) but for any long term investment its effect is very small. Banks (investment and depository), insurance companies, etc. are another story. There is no secret that major banks and insurance companies got bailed out by the Treasury, and even more, the Federal Reserve. The capitalists, who preach free markets and rugged individualism, got saved by nanny government. To add insult to injury, they were largely being saved from problems that they had created themselves. Both Bush and Obama bent over backwards not to prosecute criminal activity (see William K. Black for details). Meanwhile everybody else lost their houses and their jobs, and the job situation still ain't looking too good. While that isn't, at least strictly speaking, the stock market, is it any wonder that people don't trust financial markets and think the game is rigged.

Are we so intent on class warfare

"Class warfare" gets my vote for the most hackneyed and ultimately meaningless term of the century. What exactly is "class warfare"? From it's reflexive overuse, I can only infer that it means that any discussion of economic conflicts of interest between people of different wealth and income levels should be forbidden as crass, petty, uninformed, counter-productive, and most importantly, something that people who use the term "class warfare" don't want to discuss.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[JustOK]

When I sell high, I always get the munchies.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[lgw]

And the reason why we have a reason to care is because our pensions all got turned into 401(k) plans.

Shocking that pumping a bunch of money into the stock market causes stocks to go up. Never woulda guessed.

Pension plans were also invested in the stock market. What, you think they work by magic? OK, they probably have a bit higher percentage of bond investment than the typical guy chooses for his 401k, but I doubt is that big of a factor in the scheme of things.

If most Americans learned enough to make basic, sensible investment decisions about their 401k (the sort of stuff any financial advisor will tell you), plus the basics about how the market works mechanically, I think America would be in a far better place.

The amount of "magical thinking" involving the stock market these days scares me.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[dkleinsc]

One notable difference between a casino and the stock market is that in the stock market, the odds are in the your favor.

Not any more, for 3 reasons:
1. There is now the equivalent of the House on the stock markets, in the form a few banks who control the majority of assets.
2. The largest investment banks can and do rig almost everything, from International interest rates to aluminum commodity pricing to municipal bonds.
3. HFT combined with premiums paid for slightly early releases of information mean that by the time an ordinary investor has heard about a serious problem in one of their holdings, the damage is already done because someone else found out and reacted to it 2 seconds earlier. In other words, the true price of your assets is based on information you can't see.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[dkleinsc]

"Class warfare" gets my vote for the most hackneyed and ultimately meaningless term of the century. What exactly is "class warfare"? From it's reflexive overuse, I can only infer that it means that any discussion of economic conflicts of interest between people of different wealth and income levels should be forbidden as crass, petty, uninformed, counter-productive, and most importantly, something that people who use the term "class warfare" don't want to discuss.

"Class warfare" does mean something: It means that poor and middle-class people are complaining and reacting to being shafted by rich people, but the person who's writing wants to make it seem like those complaints or reactions are somehow illegitimate or will lead to Stalinism in America.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[bws111]

If you actually invest (like the GP said) and don't speculate, the odds are still in your favor. Things like 'getting information 2 seconds earlier' do not affect investors, they affect speculators. Unless the entire market is permenantly and constantly losing money (it isn't) the odds are in your favor if you buy and hold a diversified portfolio.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[edibobb]

You are incorrect. While nobody can predict the future, stock indexes have historically risen faster than inflation on average. There have been no fundamental changes that indicate this won't continue. For long term investment, a company's fundamentals (i.e. profits and growth) determine the stock price much more than blips caused by insider trading and other corruption. There is plenty of corruption, but not enough to outweigh a company's long-term performance. On the other hand, day traders and other short-term gamblers enjoy the full downside of the unfair advantages held by investment banks, insider traders, and other nefarious outlaws.

Re:MUAHAHAHAHA

[pnutjam]

You act as if we are being shafted anywhere nearly as bad as the Russians were by Tsarist regimes. Some of us would like to stop this country from sliding into a feudal state that can only be remedied by generations of bloodshed.

I wonder how many French nobles wished they had embraced gradual reform as they were carted to the guillotine?

It's Apple's fault

[Anonymous Coward]

Their stock has been slipping, and right when it dipped below 500 per share, NASDAQ shits the bed.

Coincidence? I think... yeah, probably, actually.

Re:It's Apple's fault

[Billly Gates]

A flash crash was what I thought.

Since these insane investors want core algorithmic changes made that could ruin the whole economy done in a matter of hours it would not surprise me if protections in the trading systems shuts them down equally in a blink of an eye so that particular investment wont lose money and cause a 2nd great depression in the process.

Re:It's Apple's fault

[Billly Gates]

Since these insane investors want core algorithmic changes made that could ruin the whole economy done in a matter of hours

It's just the stock market, a drop in the market isn't going to ruin the economy. 1929 looked bad, but the economic problems happened first, then the stock market dropped. Look at black Monday (1987) for an example of what happens with flash trading crashes......not much.

You are aware that something insane like 1/7th of the worlds money is on these systems right? Not 1929 at all.

Theoretical logic error where a less than instead of a less than or equal too is in one of these HTC systems.

Lets say this is a big one with trillions and trillions to use like Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. I dated a woman who used to work for BOA and she told me the books have 40 trillion in assets that are processed nightly on their computers. The US GDP is only $14 trillion for the record on how big of anumber this is. Mainly inflated home values spiked this as they assets were really liabilities when the housing market crashed.

Now lets say in 1/10000th of a second it shorted 15 companies stocks by accident by only 10%. Now the Goldman Sachs computer sees this and it has $15 trillion to play with. What will it do? If it is quick and short it will quickly repurchase them and sell them also at 1/10000th of a second. But it sees this on 5 other fortune 500 companies. It sells fast. Now the slower trading firms computers see this in Chicago and the 2nd tier financial systems see these 2 systems quickly selling fast as now 12 companies are affected.

What do they do Sell to keep what is has and so and so on. A full 2 seconds pass and what happens? The world's weath is gone your 401k is history, the treasury is insolvent as bonds crashed, banks are insolvent, as they always owe more than they have in assets which all their debts are traded with each as assets collecting interest.

Seems laughable just 10 years ago but this great recession and what is happening recently shows otherwise. Money is just generated out of thin air by debts and used to buy stocks which fund your 401ks and investments.

What would happen today is a totally collapse of civilation as businesses rely on computers and debt to function if you have taken any finance course. I do not mean this as an insult or to imply anything by the way as I have taken college level finance and it was shocking how answering using your profits to fund your expenses is the wrong answer. To obtain credit and hold onto your cash to raise your shareprice is always the right answer and even small business today with no shareholders relies on IOUs to stay in business unlike in 1929.

With no money 98% of all businesses would close. This is why the bailout happened in 2009 despite very angry resentment from voters.

So it is not inconcievable that a flash crash can wipe out a lot. This is why the Glass-Seagul act was written to prevent banks from being vulnerable with a crash which is now sadly appealed.

Re:It's Apple's fault

[tolkienfan]

I only read the first few lines of that because it became immediately clear that you know nothing about any of it.
1. The exchanges will ONLY match at the NBBO. Therefore you can only short at the national best offer.
2. A large aggressive sell will cause a decline in the market... hence you actually have to keep selling at lower prices.
3. After a reasonably short drop in price, a mandatory halt goes into effect... see circuit breakers. This is built into exchange matching engines to prevent flash crashes.

Even if a bunch of stocks were to plummet, the executions would be busted and the stocks would recover. This has happened... generally it due to rulings of "clearly erroneous" trades.

It's Just a Casino Anyway...

[DexterIsADog]

...which is why I keep all my money in bitcoins.

I feel indifferent.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an old school (1930s era) value investor - Ben Graham type of investor.

I don't give shit. I don't care what the know nothings on CNBC have to say (I don't think Becky is all that, BTW) nor do I care what Warren Buffet has to say - publicly.

I got an alpha of 20% right now and it's freaking me out because I'm thinking there's something wrong with my calcs. No, overall I'm up like 50+% year to date but I'm freaking out because i KNOW - I KNOW - there's luck involved and I WANT to weed it out so I can plan better.

If I were a Hedge fund or mutual fund manager, I'd be interviewed in the press and folks would be patting me on the back for my "brilliance" - fucking morons- all of them.

I got LUCKY and I'm too stupid to figure out where!!

Re:I feel indifferent.

[Anonymous Coward]

Smart man. Playing the day-trading game against the HFTs is like playing chess against Deep Blue. Might as well have a weight-lifting contest with a forklift.

Re:I feel indifferent.

[Dunbal]

No luck involved. You are merely keeping up with the devaluation/loss of purchasing power of the US dollar, whereas others (bond people, gold, etc) are not.

Re:I feel indifferent.

[hierofalcon]

Hold only works as long as a company is able to expand its business into new markets. After a point, every stock gets into a cyclical pattern where it oscillates by some percentage of its price each year.

The length of the oscillation in most cases matches whatever the tax favored length for long term versus short term is. So at some point, it doesn't pay to just hold. You can do much better by selling somewhere near the top of the currently yearly cycle and buying somewhere near the low. You don't have to hit the exact top or exact bottom. Let the experts fight over the top and bottom 15 or 20% of each year's swing in price. If you can get enough of the 60 to 70% swing in between, you can do very well.

Eventually, unless the company re-invents itself over time you get into a long term decline. There will be oscillation there as well, but the overall trend is down so it's harder to win.

Clearly, market melt downs or melt ups affect every stock without respect to where they are in the cycle, but if you graph most major stocks that you can hold with little risk, it is clear that just holding onto a stock that has passed its growth period isn't the best plan. Dividends are nice, but they'll never make up capturing the middle of the spread between a stock's typical low and high for the year.

Right about now ...

[bizitch]

.... there is a group of engineers ...

- Flop sweating their asses off
- Furiously searching their email for that ass-covering memo to their boss about the pricey "redundant this" or "redundant that" that the boss was too cheap to get
- Wondering if there is enough alcohol on earth for what they will need later tonight

Re:Right about now ...

[Etherwalk]

.... there is a group of engineers ...

- Flop sweating their asses off
- Furiously searching their email for that ass-covering memo to their boss about the pricey "redundant this" or "redundant that" that the boss was too cheap to get
- Wondering if there is enough alcohol on earth for what they will need later tonight

This is the stock exchange. "Redundant this" and "Redundant that" were in the budget, and alcohol is plentiful.

Re:Right about now ...

[bobbied]

, and alcohol is plentiful.

I think I found the problem....

LET CHAOS REIGN

[GameboyRMH]

Quick, everybody spread rumors about shutdowns and buyouts, those Wall Street fatcats will shit their pants! >:D

I don't understand the need for high-speed trading

[runeghost]

Seriously. Is there any real need (beyond that for connected players to be able skim money off the top) for anyone to be able to sell and buy stock (or commodities) in a tiny fraction of a second, instead of say, once every fifteen minutes or even longer?

obvious

[slashmydots]

Must be Windows Updates forcing a reboot. That's usually the problem.

Re:obvious

[chill]

Specifically, NASDAQ runs UTP from NYSE-Euronext.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Trading_Platform

UTP runs on Linux [pdf link].

https://nysetechnologies.nyx.com/sites/technologies.nyx.com/files/L5756_NYSE%20Tech%20UTP_IM_OST_100105b.pdf

Re:obvious

[chill]

Correction. NASDAQ does not license NYSE-Euronext UDP. They run NASDAQ-OMX INET. They are the major competitor for trading platforms to Euronext.

INET, however, also runs on Linux.

Mea culpa. Too many tabs onpen.

Goldman must have lost money on a trade

[JoeyRox]

In case you didn't know Goldman is never supposed to lose money on a trade, which is why they can report 100+ days of consecutive trading profits, which is a mathematical impossibility in a non-rigged market.

Re:Goldman must have lost money on a trade

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not mathematically impossible. It is statistically improbable.

Re:Ran out

[GameboyRMH]

*to throw orphans. I accidentally the whole thing :-(

Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad

[alexander_686]

Sure.

In the old days (80s, 90s), when it was seconds, the middle men grabbed 12.5 to 25 cents per share. Before then, when it was minutes, they would grab 50 cents. Costs for the average small investor have fallen by over 90%. If you invest in index funds your costs have fallen by over 95%. (But wait you say – I don’t trade my index funds. Look at your funds expense ratio, pull out the supplementary prospectus information on what portion of that is trading costs for the past 20 years, and gap.)

Or, to put it another way, would you rather have dozens of HFT fighting for your business or an oligopoly of clique, cozy partnerships. Not saying it is perfect but that it is an improvement.

Don't forget about...

[tool462]

... the group of MBAs ...

  - Flop sweating their asses of
  - Furiously searching their email for that ass-covering memo where the IT guy said "Yeah, this should work"
  - Wondering if there is enough coke on earth to get them through the rest of the day

For these guys, there are only two universal truths:
    1) This is absolutely, positively, 100% the IT guy's fault
    2) He can not fix this without the IT guy.
The impotent rage would be palpable.

Re:Don't forget about...

[supremebob]

That's OK... the MBA's get their vengeance by asking the server admins for a status update every 5 minutes while they are busy trying to fix the problem.

Then they'll ask IT for a 20 page root cause analysis report of the outage the following day after service is restored, even though they have no intention of reading it past the first paragraph. Not that they would understand what they were reading anyway.

Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad

[Dunbal]

Yep, because they know how to trade. HFT won't guarantee a winning trade however, when the market moves the other way. And believe me it happens often. There's more to it than just having a fast connection. For an example I can point to KCG (Knight Capital Group), whose HFT programs lost them what was it, 400+ million in a few minutes when FB was launched? It broke the company, anyway. HFT is not always "good". You have to know how to use it, too.

Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad

[runeghost]

Seriously. Is there any real need (beyond that for connected players to be able skim money off the top) for anyone to be able to sell and buy stock (or commodities) in a tiny fraction of a second, instead of say, once every fifteen minutes or even longer?

Time is money. Time passes as new information is acquired or transmitted. Shorter time intervals will therefore always be desirable for making a market more efficient and to accurately reflect reality. The more time it takes to buy and sell, the more risk there is in buying or holding stock, because the stock is less liquid and its value can change dramatically in very little time.

Wait, wait, wait. I'm grokking some of the other points in favor of high-frequency trading, but are you actually claiming that the stock market reflects reality?

Re:Hmmmm

[runeghost]

The NSA must be installing new taps.

Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad

[lgw]

You don't make money by "getting in the middle of slower orders" in any risk-free way. Markets don't work that way. You do make money by being the first to trade on "news", but better that than insider trading (i.e., better to trade 1 ms after than 1 week before). You do make money by taking a little risk as a market maker, but HFT has squeezed profits there very thin.

Do you have any idea how tiny $1 B/year is compared to the amount of stock that trades each year? I'm sure profits are much higher, just on first-after-news trading, and that doesn't mean there's a problem.

When I trade (being a little guy who doesn't follow the markets constantly) I get a better price thanks to HFT: the bid-ask gap is tiny these days, often 1 cent, and my broker makes $10 on the same trade the HFT guy makes $0.01 or so.

Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad

[alexander_686]

I think what you want to say is “only a billion” – as in it is small and falling number in historical terms.

Then let’s view trading costs as analogous to waste friction in a mechanical system – the lower the better. How should we measure this waste? Read up on “Implementation shortfall”. It’s the gold standard in the industry. (Rarely implemented because it’s complex, but still, the best theoretical method of measuring waste.)
Now, anybody claiming much about how much made what when or the effect of which market maker or HFT needs to be treated with a large grain of salt. Those numbers are highly propitiatory. However, we can, and have, measured the cost of trading at mutual funds – which have to publish a lot of public information.

Rewind the clock to the 90s and you can see that the costs have fallen by 80%. Why is that? In the old days, the 30 odd market makers on the NYSE would make billions each year – mostly risk fee. We can probably trace about ½ the gain to HFT.

Re:The little guys started to win.

[HiThere]

FWIW, I don't rate day traders much higher than I do HFT traders. Both are parasites....occasionally slightly useful, but not sufficiently enough so to justify their existence.

Is this related to the Hindenburg Omen?

[stewsters]

I was searching for Archer quotes, but I accidentally found this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/breakout/hindenburg-omen-very-ominous-high-technical-warning-sign-163004190.html
I wonder if there is a relation?

Dang that NSA server crashed?

[bobbied]

You KNOW the NSA has a server (or two) in the middle of all this.. Makes ya wonder eh?

Re:I don't understand the need for high-speed trad

[PPH]

HFT won't guarantee a winning trade however,

Yes, it does. At least the way it has been set up. HFT lets some traders outbid others by submitting a whole series of offers and then canceling the one that won't make them any money. Its an abuse of a feature demanded by HF traders to unwind 'system errors' created by such rapid transactions. In reality, its like being able to put a bet down at a roulette table and then pick it back up quickly when you see where the ball lands.

Its fraud and HF traders should be in prison. Except that the brokerages like the commission business.

Technically this only affected NASD options

[WillAffleckUW]

This really only affected the gamblers in the market using NASDAQ options, not people buying and selling actual shares.

It didn't impact limit orders up/down, or any buy or sell orders, just the gamblers that exaggerate noise in the market signal to bet against other computer systems that exaggerate more noise.

No actual investors were harmed, only gamblers. You could see it in the calm reaction of the shares - instead of bouncing up and down as gamblers tried to tweak it up and down for profits, it remained stable, since the reality was that the share pricing does not actually trade that much without gamblers distorting the signal.