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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: axial who wrote (37791)	2/20/2011 6:58:15 PM
From: Maurice Winn	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

Sure Jim, traders will whine: <“As a trader, there’s a frustration around feeling like you’re being gamed”... > If they don't know who the sucker in the room is, then it's them. Said trader should get a job more suited to their talents. My car needs cleaning, house painting and trees pruning. They could try that. Yes, the trader is being gamed, by people with PhDs in mathematics with huge budgets available to buy computers, software and access. If said trader wants to take them on, said trader had better be a remarkable trader. Yes, technology can fail and will when Net Neutrality makes it illegal to stop the internet going into Netilepsy, which would be an excellent gaming strategy for those supersonic million mile a minute computers to try - that would panic the rubes then the supersonic computers could open the valves and nab the trades as the panicked dump their stocks. They could model the regulators' trade-canceling behaviour too, to maximize returns when trades are canceled. It's very nice of the regulators to boost the supersonic million mile a minute traders' profits even more. Here is a hint for Ms Reynolds; if she wants to buy or sell something, she will have to say what she wants to buy or sell <She also knows that the HFTs are bluffing: their orders are an attempt to get her to reveal what she wants to buy and sell. > Here's another hint, nobody will buy it if they don't know whether it's a house, some shares, a dog or a pound of bananas. Here, free for the taking, is yet another hint - she will have to give a price at which she will buy them or sell them, or accept an offer which is being made at a particular price. If a fast computer beats her to the offer, she does not have to accept a higher offer. She can just wait, for more to be offered at that price. Or, she could put an offer to buy at that price and leave it sitting there for a seller to notice. Maybe she is just whining that her computers and brains are too slow to figure out what prices to offer and accept. I have some QCOM shares for sale, $82.82. Send money, they are yours. See - simple. Just tell people what's for sale and they can agree to buy them or not. I will also buy a Tonka Truckload of them for $32 a share - ship them over and I'll deliver cash on the barrel-head. You are welcome to use a supersonic million mile a minute computer to do the trades for you if you like. No worries. Or carrier pigeon if you prefer. Snail mail okay too. What? Me worry? Mqurice

To: axial who wrote (37791)	4/3/2011 4:39:05 PM
From: axial	Respond to of 46821

[4] The accepted fact that MALICIOUS algorithms (as opposed to mistakes) can propagate effects widely and nearly instantaneously. --- Robots Rattle Data Guru A savvy market watcher has detected some suspicious -- and very, very fast -- automated-trading activity in March. Flash Crash 2? "New robotic-trading strategies are attempting to hack futures and equities markets -- again. The suspicious activity appears unconnected to the October cyberattack on Nasdaq OMX Group (ticker: NDAQ) now being investigated by the National Security Agency. But there seems to be a new team of trading 'bots abroad -- and yes, they're distorting prices. The suspect algorithms first appeared March 2, Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, a Winnetka, Ill., data firm, tells Barron's. When rapid-fire automated-trading systems torched the indexes in the infamous May 6, 2010, "flash crash," Hunsader was the first to notice that the Consolidated Quote System (CQS) was running 35 seconds late... ... Automated systems are programmed by mathematicians whose ultra-short-term strategies have radically altered markets. And while there have been flash-crash fixes, they haven't stopped the new invaders, which are orders of magnitude faster... "... Another algorithm, says Hunsader, changes order sizes at the top of the order book in about 20 to 40 stocks on Nasdaq for a few milliseconds several times a day. Each stock is traded anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 times a second, double to quadruple the norm. The activity floods the quote system with trade data, but so far seems to cause no harm. On March 16, the CQS saw peak-volume traffic hit warp speed: a record 390,000 messages per second for all stock symbols between 11:01 a.m. and 11:02 a.m. (A year ago, such volume would have swamped the CQS, as peak capacity was 200,000 messages a second.) At 11:01:48 a.m. -- the peak of the weird trading -- 10.5% of the quotes on CQS were locked or crossed, meaning that the bid exceeded the offer. The next second, it was 13%. Usually, about 3% of trades are crossed. Hunsader wonders why the exchanges are not saying that they are worried. This is all too similar to what happened during the 2010 flash crash, causing the delay that went unnoticed by regulators and market experts -- despite all their monitoring equipment. Meanwhile, CQS has been upgraded to handle 750,000 messages a second; by July, total capacity will be one million messages per second... What helps legit trading will also help fast hackers." online.barrons.com Jim

To: axial who wrote (37791)	7/17/2011 1:03:04 PM
From: axial	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 46821

How The Pursuit Of "Light Speed" Broke Equity Markets, Or Why The NBBO Is No Longer Relevant "Each exchange computes the NBBO internally from their direct connections to other exchanges. As the speed of trading increases, the likelihood of two exchanges having the same NBBO decreases. Most of this is because of the pesky speed-of-light limitation. So how does a trader know whether a trade was routed properly to the exchange with the best price? He doesn't. It is impossible." More: zerohedge.com Jim