Still Rigged
| Last April the book “Flash Boys” was in the news. The author, Michael Lewis, had the nerve to expose the heretofore secret of HFT trading success: special access to the exchanges that are simply not available to everyone else. He specifically highlighted how HFT companies built a faster trading “pipe” that gives them the ability to see orders so quickly, that they could be acted on before they can be filled. Because of this, markets are littered with fake orders (so-called liquidity) and front-running of orders.
In two words: still rigged.
Other people and companies have been trying to expose this but never gained any traction. Perhaps, after the Flash Boys splash, Nanex's following exposure of an exact example of the market's rigged nature, even more light will be shined on this scam.
We received trade execution reports from an active trader who wanted to know why his larger orders almost never completely filled, even when the amount of stock advertised exceeded the number of shares wanted. For example, if 25,000 shares were at the best offer, and he sent in a limit order at the best offer price for 20,000 shares, the trade would, more likely than not, come back partially filled. In some cases, more than half of the amount of stock advertised (quoted) would disappear immediately before his order arrived at the exchange. This was the case, even in deeply liquid stocks such as Ford Motor Co (symbol F, market cap: $70 Billion). The trader sent us his trade execution reports, and we matched up his trades with our detailed consolidated quote and trade data to discover that the mechanism described in Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" was alive and well on Wall Street.
Let's take a look at what we found from analyzing 5 large trades executed at different times over a 4 minute period in Ford Motor Co. Before each of these trades, the activity in the stock was whisper quiet. Here's a chart showing millisecond by millisecond trade and quote counts in Ford leading up to one of these 5 trades:
The charts can be found here nanex.net
You can clearly tell when the trade hits: activity explodes to over 80 quotes in 1 millisecond (this is equivalent to 80K messages/second as far as network/system latency goes). But the point here is that nothing was going on in this stock in the immediate period before this trade hits the market.
In this particular example, there were a total of 24,800 shares advertised for sale at $17.38 (all trades and offered liquidity will be at this same price) from 8 exchanges. The trader wanted 20,000 of these shares. What he got was only 12,133 shares and 600 of these were on a dark pool (which wasn't part of the 24,800 shares of liquidity on the lit exchanges)! Worse, someone ELSE was filled for 1,570 shares during these same milliseconds! Remember, nothing was happening in Ford until his order came into the market. Based on the other 4 examples, we are sure that no trades would have occurred during these few milliseconds of time if it wasn't for this trader's order.
What happened to the 24,800 shares offered and why couldn't he get at least 20,000 of them? How is it that others were able to get shares during this time? This is especially disturbing when you consider these other traders (HFT) only bought shares in reaction to the original trader's order.
The next 19 entries (lines 9 to 27) show a flurry of order cancellations coming in from NYSE, ARCA, BATS, NQEX and EDGX. This is before the first trade execution at any of those exchanges! This flurry of cancellations removes 10,300 shares from the number of shares offered (Shares Avail. column drop from 21,400 down to 11,100)!
Within 2 milliseconds, half of the shares have disappeared, someone else stole 67 shares, and our trader has only 13.5% (2,700 shares) of his order filled!
The charts can be found here nanex.net
Conclusion
All this evidence points to an inescapable conclusion:
The order cancellations and trades executing just before, or during the traders order were not a coincidence. This is premeditated, programmed theft, plain and simple.
Michael Lewis probably said it best when he told 60 minutes that the stock market is rigged. To the fantastic claims made by HFT that they provide liquidity, perhaps we should ask, what kind of liquidity? To the now obviously ludicrous claim that "everyone's order uses the same tools that HFT uses", we'll just say, the data shows otherwise. To Mary Jo White and other officials who claim the market isn't rigged and that regulators need to look at the data before making any decisions, well, you made it this far - if things aren't clear, just re-read the above, or just call us and we'll explain it to you. Or dust off Midas and lets us show you how to work with data.
One more note to the SEC in particular - if you believe that the industry can fix these problems on their own, then we believe you are no longer fit to regulate, because that is not, and never was, how Wall Street works. Honestly, a free for all, no–holds–barred environment would be better than the current system of complicated rules which are partially enforced, but only against some participants. And make no mistake, what is shown above is as close to automatic pilfering as one can get. It probably results in a few firms showing spectacularly perfect trading records; it definitely results in people believing the market is unfair and corrupt.
And to CNBC and other financial media companies who say these problems have all been fixed - we think you might have been lied to. Probably by the ones doing the market rigging.
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