House Calls For Hearing On Stock Market "Glitch" 180
Lucas123 writes "The House Financial Services securities subcommittee plans to hold a hearing next Tuesday to examine what caused the US stock market to plunge almost 1,000 points in a half hour Thursday, and it called on the SEC to investigate possible problems with computer algorithms that may have exacerbated a human order-entry error and led to the precipitous drop. 'Reports have surfaced that much of this movement was potentially as a result of a computer glitch,' Committee Chairman Kanjorski said. 'We cannot allow a technological error to spook the markets and cause panic. This is unacceptable. In this day and age and with the use of such complex technology, we should be able to make sure that our financial markets are effectively monitored and investors are protected.'"
Its strange. (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean.. they *have* the logs, i hope. I mean they *have* some software anyway which does data-mining to analyze for unusual things....
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Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you suggesting we shouldn't have a hearing for it?
All hearings are these days is a convoluted way for politicos to take cheap shots at someone to boost their popularity at home.
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And when weren't they?
This is a job for the executive branch. Actually.. maybe it's a job for *nobody* since it's likely that it was just automated trading triggers all got..triggered.. for some reason.
That suggests that the trading companies need to do failure analysis, not that the government needs to step in and do...something...
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I haven't followed the story that closely. Why is this an "idiotic excuse".
So much of the trading is done automatically that seeing someone short a billion shares of a blue chip could make some big waves. But you'd think there'd be a prompt on the screen: "Are you sure? Y,N"
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I haven't followed the story that closely. Why is this an "idiotic excuse".
So much of the trading is done automatically that seeing someone short a billion shares of a blue chip could make some big waves. But you'd think there'd be a prompt on the screen: "Are you sure? Y,N"
Maybe a peer review process your help. Something like Trades over this value have to go to another trader in your team for approval.
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Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I can see a trader missing two prompts in a row if they've snorted enough coke.
I used to work in the building that houses the Mercantile Exchange here in Chicago, and the traders on the floor seemed to be a pretty high-flying group, if you get my meaning.
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That makes me think of those experiments with rhesus monkeys self administering cocaine. Maybe they just moved the monkeys to trading desks when the experiment was complete.
Merrill Lynch Interviewer: I like the cut of your jib monkey! [sniffs, wipes nose] When can you start?
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And, on the unlikely event that it *is* true, its all the more reason to HAVE a hearing because anyone can legitimately crash the stock market by simply making a trade.
You seem to have a misconception as to what the market is. It is simply a room (either physical, electronic, or both) in which buyers and sellers make trades. That's all it is. So, saying its unreasonable for a single trade to crash the stock market is a bit like saying its unreasonable for a single command like "sudo rm -rf /" to crash your computer.
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it's more like DNS.. when somebody puts a bad route in a trusted host (like sending Yahoo to 127.0.0.1) that gets picked up automatically in up dates until somebody cuts off the "wrong" server or changes that entry. Trading is a lot like those problems, lots of "trusted" systems that take buy and sell and short orders and automatically process them when the criteria is hit. We all know how easy it is for some ISP in Southeast Asia being overly zealous can shut down the internet for a day.. this is the same
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Yes, I also think that the "someone hit B instead of M" story is in fact: BM
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I see two solutions:-
1) Go 100% computerised and just throw in the odd random factor to keep things moving. After all, it's all one big random gamble anyway, may as well just admit it.
2
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but you know the "house always wins" so if YOU reacted to this crisis several brokers got nice cuts.... when their computers caused the problems in the first place.
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However, they should have a "real investigation" to find out:
Why on earth did it rebound the way it did and remain stable the rest of the day ?
Why are their reports that traders were locked out their systems during the entire 10-15 minutes of the drop ?
What effects the "Working Group on Financial Markets" aka Plunge Protection Team have on the markets. This entity has absolutely no oversight and can pretty much manipulate the markets how it wishes. The "conspiracy theorist" in me think that they might hav
To whoever can help me understand this (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps someone who knows more about stock trading can help me understand:
1) TFA states that someone made an input mistake and sold 16 billon Fortune 500 stocks instead of 16 millon. Did he have that many to sell? How big a player do you have to be to be able to make these type of mistakes.
2) TFA states that at one point shares for some companies dropped to a mere penny and then rebounded. Were people able to take advantage of the sudden drop to sweep and get a fast couple of millons due to the glitch?
And in conclusion: Does the system's inherent frailty allow this type of event to be orchestrated in order to make a big profit, or a new type of terror attack?
Re:To whoever can help me understand this (Score:4, Interesting)
This sounds like the sort of apocryphal story someone made up meaning it sarcastically. ("WTF happened? Probably some moron hit 16 billion instead of 16 million!"). If there was a 16 billion dollar sell order, there's a record of it and it wouldn't still be speculation now.
Some of the exchanges reversed those transactions on some of the stocks, but not all of them. Some people with existing limit orders probably did pretty darned good.
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Except that it isn't. The system recovered within five minutes because the glitch presented such ridiculous buying opportunities that any sensible person would buy. The macroeconomic system is inherently self-righting; it's just a matter of time-scale. For stocks, the time scale is minutes for bargain hunters. But I can agree that people are indeed "finicky". I look forward to the market declining in the next few weeks as people panic over Europe
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It'll take a serious investigation to discover the people who are really behind this orchestrated crash.
Yeah, yeah, yeah .... (Score:2, Funny)
Wall Street sits there.
Nothing gets done.
And in this case, I don't there's really anything to be done. It was a mistake that was corrected and if anyone was hurt, it was Wall Street traders and the only thing I have for them is this nano-tech violin.
If you had your mutual fund or individual stocks, it really didn't affect you.
Re:Yeah, yeah, yeah .... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's something for the politicians to do to continue painting a big red X on Wall Street so they can take it over and control it themselves. I'm beginning to think Congress' job is to take over things and run them in a constant state of deficient funds.
Do you want to make this multi-billion $ trade? (Score:5, Funny)
Cancel or Allow?
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*clicks on [x] to close window*
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(*program transfers money*)
Should, would, could (Score:2)
"we should be able to make sure that our financial markets are effectively monitored and investors are protected".
New York, concrete jungle where dreams are Madoff.
What glitch? (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/day-market-almost-died-courtesy-high-frequency-trading [zerohedge.com]
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=conewsstory&tkr=C%3AUS&sid=agW5_B0D1z9M [bloomberg.com]
"CME Group Statement on Today's Market Activity:"
"does not appear to be irregular or unusual in light of market activity today"
Re:What glitch? (Score:5, Interesting)
After today investors will have little if any faith left in the US stocks, assuming they had any to begin with.
During the GM bankruptcy, I saw their common stock was still being traded on the pink sheets. That's when I realized that many traders have shit for brains.
When a company goes bankrupt, their equity gets wiped out. In other words, the traders were trading worthless pieces of paper. My father in law almost bought some thinking it was a great deal. I clued him into the idiocy.
Re:What glitch? (Score:4, Informative)
During the GM bankruptcy, I saw their common stock was still being traded on the pink sheets. That's when I realized that many traders have shit for brains.
Bankruptcy does not always wipe out equity in Chapter 11 cases. Some people bet that the bad news isn't as bad as thought. Having said that, I went through a phase where I bet on bankrupt and near bankrupt companies with rather poor success. The thing I figured out later is that at very low share prices, a little too much optimism can pump up a stock quite a bit. So I was almost always paying a hidden premium on these companies even though they were near bankruptcy.
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There was another factor at play with GM, and it was stupidity. When GM was restructured and GM NEW STOCK came out, the price of GM OLD STOCK (which was now worth nothing) spiked upwards. Apparently, idiots wanted to buy GM on news that it came out of bankruptcy but bought shares in the bankruptcy vehicle.
Re:What glitch? (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. A friend of mine who is a lawyer for a well-known investment management firm was amazed when their traders were doing business with Lehman the day after it filed for bankruptcy.
When he asked them what the hell they were doing trading with a bankrupt, they told him "but the prices on the screen are amazing!"
He had to explain to them that the prices were amazing because they were unlikely to see the transaction completed by their counterparty. "Have you not been reading the papers?" he asked, exasperated. But all they could do was stare at the trading screen.
They just didn't get it. That's the thing about these so-called Masters of the Universe - they're not the best and the brightest despite what they think.
My friend then had to spend the next 36 hours working non-stop to close the positions his traders had taken as best he could. The really astonishing thing was that his boss reprimanded him for not explicitly telling the traders earlier not to trade with Lehman.
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You have to note that General Motors entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, rather than Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation. In Chapter 11, the company gets a court supervised reprieve from debt payments in order to renegotiate those payments with its suppliers and bondholders. Whether the shareholders get wiped out or not depends on whether the bondholders insist that they be wiped out.
If in another five years, GM is trading a lot higher than it did during Chapter 11, you should be ready to explain to yo
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To echo that top link:
"After today investors will have little if any faith left in the US stocks, assuming they had any to begin with."
That describes me. I've got some respectable money in my 401k, but I'm early in my career (early 30s). I don't believe Social Security will still be around when I retire, and with these idiots on Wall Street, I don't think any of my 401k will be either. I predict a lot of people shifting their 401k investments towards bond funds shortly.
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The problem I have with the "blame high frequency trading" narrative is that it doesn't explain all the other times when high frequency trading could have done even more damage, but didn't. If these algorithms are so sensitive that a tiny fluctuation can set them off, then why didn't markets tank even harder in response to truly monumental events, like Lehman going bankrupt, or the House of Representatives' initial rejection of the TARP? I mean, you would have figured that the same algorithms would have k
Protection... (Score:3, Insightful)
"This is unacceptable. In this day and age and with the use of such complex technology, we should be able to make sure that our financial markets are effectively monitored and investors are protected." ... because protectig investors is more important than protecting the economy.
Re:Protection... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hint: investors are the economy. Without investment and trade, there is no economy to speak of.
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And without resources, workers, producers, consumers, etc. there would be no economy to speak of too.
If there is a lesson to be learend from the recent civil uprising in Greece then it's that there is more to economics than investors.
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I agree 100%. However, one must acknowledge that Greece would not be in the pickle that it is today if it were not for multiple Grecian governments borrowing and spending money that they could not effectively repay. In other words, there wouldn't be any civil unrest if Greece had taken into account the long term consequences of the contracts it was entering into with investors.
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So ... if a non-traded company has a large number of employees, large revenue, makes semi-products and reinvests most of its surplus into expanding its production lines ... it has no impact on the economy?
Or let's look at it another way - how many companies in the US are traded companies? How many people do they employ? I don't know the numbers, but I'm fairly certain you'll find that it's about 50% or so.
And while these companies may not have much if any impact on what goes on in the stock market, I'm pret
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Think of the children! Sorry...
I've seen a trend recently... and I think my sig says it best. (Rights are not Entitlements)
People somehow think that they should be immune to failure and the government should protect them from failing.
The plunge (partly) explained (Score:3, Informative)
Felix Salmon also did a good explanatory post [reuters.com] that pulled in work from other writers about what might have happened and why.
Mr. Salmon's post links to a thought provoking post by a blogger named Kid Dynamite [blogspot.com], who posits that it's a really bad precedent to cancel the erroneous trades because it lets the program traders off the hook for the consequences of their computer mess-up.
You call it a glitch. I call it a successful test! (Score:2)
*Much* easier to buy on those dips when you can induce the dips with software. Shares dropped to a penny? I'll take a million please!
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If you were subtle about it, spreading out your trades and not hitting the ones with the highest differentials, you could exploit this hack for a long time.
cancelled orders more than 60% off (Score:5, Insightful)
Who decides that? And what happens to a smart invester that buys stock at $0.01 that usually trades at $40, to quickly later sell it at $30? Will the $0.01 buys be cancelled, but the $30 sells not be cancelled? But that would leave you with a short position, having to buy them back at $40. May be very expensive.
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And what happens to a smart invester[sic] that buys stock at $0.01 that usually trades at $40, to quickly later sell it at $30? Will the $0.01 buys be cancelled, but the $30 sells not be cancelled? But that would leave you with a short position, having to buy them back at $40.
I agree that that would be unfair.
Perhaps, though not ideal, they could address that issue by forcing the original $0.01 trade at the $30 price.
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My heart bleeds, maybe he could just get a job instead of trying to make money out of nothing.
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Small guys are not making millisecond trades on the stock market. They might have a pension fund, they might invest long-term in a few companies. They're not sitting 16 hours a day at a super computer hooked right into the exchange, looking for things like this as a vulture watches for a wounded animal.
There's no 'punish' about it, if professional gamblers get their f
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The main difference being that the gamblers are playing with their own money, and if they screw up, they will feel the pain, whereas the investors and bankers get to lose billions of dollars and still get millions of dollars in bonuses. They do well, they get paid, they do badly, they get paid. How will they learn?
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Are they going to start Invalidating trades that are "Too good" too?
Or is this more of Privatize Profit, socialize losses.
I would love the see people lose their shorts, so maybe they would be a bit more careful next time
Who made the money? (Score:5, Interesting)
It shows that stock and market are unlinked (Score:2)
Let's be sensible here. Stock should (big should) represent the value of a company based on its market value. If a company's doing good, its stock should be valuable because it's backed by the market strength of the company represented.
Thus such a "glitch" should have little effect. But it has incredible effect. Why? Because stock values are horribly inflated. Still, even after the bubble allegedly popped. We're still heaps over value. Have been for quite a while now.
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I dunno ... but gambling with your country's economy sounds like a very dumb idea.
I am amused at the assumption of error... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am amused at the assumption of error too... (Score:2)
Who is to say that you mom isn't being routinely buying crack for sex, and somebody goofed the size of the planned "bump"? ;)
P.S.: You are employing Glenn Beck “logic”. Please don’t.
It costs money (Score:2)
I suspect this is another one of those cases where the customer (government) wanted all kinds of features and monitoring but started to cut corners when it came with a price tag. It's amazing how little gets accomplished when the customer wants the pie in the sky features and doesn't realize it costs money.
Yes, I realize this works both ways. It could be that the requested monitoring and features were priced outlandishly by the contractor. In the end, everybody loses. All in all, I'm not going to hold m
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Grandstanding as usual. (Score:2)
Of course not!
Just a way to look like they are doing something in an election year.
If they were serious about the real problem they would balance the budget.
Ok have more computers monitor..... (Score:2)
Oh wait, there already doing that with humans ready to sell and buy ...... but who wants you to know that?
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,676634,00.html [spiegel.de]
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stockmarket.html [pbs.org]
Officer B. Madoff will show up if you call 911 about it.
Latency (Score:2)
Just put in XX hours of lag on the trading on stocks. The daytrading bring nothing positive to the companies.
Complete bullshit (Score:2)
This is just a diversion so that those with money invested have time to get that money out before the majority of investors wake up and realize there are huge real problems. The Greek economic crisis is just a taste of the problems to come as developed economies have taken dangerously high proportions of debt to bail out their banks.
The bankers run everything. /paranoid rant
Who da mark? (Score:2)
As someone once said, "If you look around the table and you don't spot the mark, it's you."
Synchronous clocking scheme? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder whether the synchronous-counter approach would help reduce glitches here. In other words:
- at HH:MM:00 update the prices (and allow the change to propagate; everyone can put in their next trade order)
- at HH:MM:30 execute the trades (and then there are 30 seconds to decide on the new price before a value is propagated)
This is the way that synchronous logic works. The current model is more like hundreds of ripple-counters.
(It would also ensure slightly greater fairness by not giving an advantage to the person with the absolutely fastest network connection, and would slow down the cycles so that a market collapse took many minutes.)
Complex technology? (Score:2)
In this day and age because of the use of such complex technology,
There, fixed that for ya.
Joker says (Score:2)
Why so serious?
Legalized Gambling (Score:2)
It's getting closer to a time when the entire world economy collapses due to a chained event in the stock markets that wipes out all this virtual equity and maybe then people will start considering a ban on this legalized form of gambling that is today's stock market. Stocks change positions these days based on rumors and lose equity due to glitches and nobody really understands what real equity exists in these companies that are being traded because it so convoluted and vaporous.
We need a Butlerian Jihad
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I'm pretty sure Brazil imported this idea from somewhere else and I strongly belive this place is the US. I just don't know if 1000 points were enough to trigger it.
I am not a stockbroker but my understanding is that there are "circuit breakers" built into the electronic trading system but they don't trip until the market drops 10%. The 1000-point drop was just shy of that, which makes me wonder if there wasn't some deliberate manipulation involved. That's pure speculation, of course, I have no evidence of it.
Re:Suggestion (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, we are sinking to new levels of idiocy now.
The MSM would have you believe that the tremendous sell-off in the markets was just a trading error. If it was a trading error, then these markets SUCK! Are you telling me we put TRILLIONS of dollars, including our retirement savings, into a system that can be completely thrown into chaos because a single guy hits the wrong button on a single transaction? It’s a good thing Faisal Shahzad isn’t still working on Wall Street anymore, or he could have just pushed a button and caused a lot more damage that way than he did with a faulty car bomb
This is financial terrorism, folks, retail traders were stopped out and margined out while the pros made Billions picking up the pieces. Don’t worry though, if you are rich enough and connected enough, the Nasdaq will reverse your losses but if they really wanted to make amends, they would cancel the day’s trading for ALL traders.
This market didn’t just sell off because of a trading mistake. Whatever really happened, it happened because there were no real buyers when the selling came - something I have been warning would happen during the last 3 months of low-volume run-ups. I keep using the house of cards/Jenga metaphor and that’s exactly what we have so be very careful when the same idiots who have been telling you BUYBUYBUY are now telling you to "come back in - the water’s fine."
and here: [zerohedge.com]
Having seen the capitulation unfold second by second and then listen to CNBC come up with every excuse under the sun just got under my skin. I've decided to chart some of our one second analytics charts of the capitulation unfolding on our screens. The chart below (more to follow) captures the moment of the final capitulation, before the reversal today. The idea that it was a 'fat finger' error is ludicrous; unless the fat finger hit every market in the world virtually simultaneously. Liquidity simply left the world financial markets for about four minutes this afternoon. The bids just vanished. And what else vanished? Remember the vaunted supplemental liquidity providers, led by Goldman Sachs. Remember that they are paid to "provide liquidity" through their predatory high-frequency algos, they are not required to do so. So when the S@#$T hit the fan they just disappeared. In one second more or less someone (and yes, under these circumstances, human beings take control of the machines) made the decision to pull the bids on every equity in the S&P, every financial futures contract, every FX contract in every market in the world. This kind of thing just doesn't happen in a pure auction environment; there just isn't a tight enough communication link between the parties to allow the decisions to propagate within the same second -- even with HFT algorithms. No. Some human made the decision to pull the bids; all of them, all at once. If that is not a condemnation of the concentration of financial power and the systematic risk it engenders I don't know what is.
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That's all interesting, but none of it counts as actual evidence any more than my own speculation does.
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That's the risk you take when you choose to follow the herd. I'm also a small investor who can't watch my stocks all day long, but guess what? When my stocks go down 10%, I buy more. In fact, some of my stocks were down 90% from their highs during the crash of '08. Yes, I bought more, and yes, I ended up making a lot of money. Of course, I made no where near the kind of returns John Pauls
Re:Suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, stop losses are not a "strategy", they are a tactic. My strategy is to invest in solid, widely traded, predominantly blue chip companies or in broad indices via ETFs. None of these types of investments should gyrate 10% in value in a matter of minutes because that means hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars are vanishing and/or appearing. Of course, sometimes oil wells explode and big companies can take an instantaneous hit in their market cap (stop losses salvaged a year's gains on my BP stock just one week ago). Those types of events are fortunately rare, affect one or a small group of companies and are what stop losses are mostly for. Thursday was more like a magician's trick. One minute the trillion dollars is in his left hand. Then a blink later it's in his right. I suppose it doesn't matter to you that the "left hand" was largely small investors like me and the "right hand" was hedge funds, high frequency programmed traders and banks, but to me something smells rotten.
How exactly does micro-penny programmed trading accomplish this? Positions are bought and sold in microseconds skimming micropennies on each share transacted. The computer with the fastest network access wins. This, you assert, is efficient allocation of capital? This is good because it transfers capital from "panicky emotional investors" to people who will better allocate it? What is the real economic benefit of this activity, because one undeniable side affect of it is to distort and destabilize the market.
I very rarely find myself in favor of increased regulation, but in this case I think the rules do indeed need to be changed. If the majority of people lose faith in the market capital allocation will be severely and negatively impacted.
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So, you piggy-backed off others' decisions. In other words, some people read the news about BP and decided how much they wanted to sell. But you didn't make your decision based on the news; your decision to sell was based on the fact that the herd was selling. And that turned out to be a good decision. Nothing wrong with that. But there's nothing wrong with people shaking off their coattails, either. If the smart money managers realize th
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Our markets had this feature (I believe its called a "circuit breaker") added after the massive crashes of the '80s. In this case, however, the price declines were not large enough in either velocity or magnitude to trip these automatic safeguards.
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I dont understand either. Listed securities have 1 specialist making market. When there's a trade imbalance it's the specialists job to close the market and match buyers and sellers, or buy from his own account.
So this order hits the desk and he doesn't stop trading??
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All the crazy action was on electronic systems that are allowed to "trade around" the primary exchange. The huge spikes shown everywhere represent a very small volume of trades.
So the worst hit stocks were NYSE listed stocks that traded on electronic boards (because the NYSE did have a quiet period, there was fast, thin trading in those stocks). NASDAQ never paused trading, so they were able to sit on the other side of some of the crazy action, limiting how crazy it got.
NASDAQ says that NYSE shouldn't have
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Civil war II, CORPS vs GOVS (Score:2)
"You people on Wall Street are ruining the economy and cheating people!"
Wall Street Trader screams back : "No Sir! YOU POLITICIANS ARE RUINING THE ECONOMY!"
Wall st plots a failed coup attempting to bribe a few senators and spies. Congress shuts down several corporations, has police arrest executives, who mysteriously disappear the next day, as well as a few senators. Security contractors secure corporation offices, which return to functioning. Newspapers align with corporations and publish numerous humiliating stories of non-corporate senate and congress members in an attempt to discredit and force them out. National Guard barricade, corporate buildings, order
Re:Big Bank Conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it mere coincidence that the Senate planned for a vote to break up the big banks on the same day?
"In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happened, you can bet it was planned that way."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
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they force stop loss positions all over the place. This forces people to sell, and make VIX go up alot.
To be blunt, no one forced those people to place stop orders. They willingly entered into the obligation. I see this sort of complaint as a desire to make the markets nicer and less dangerous than they can be. When you place a stop order, you need to keep in mind that the stop may execute for unintended reasons like some sort of error on the exchange or because someone is fishing (legally or otherwise) for stops.
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No sympathy??
Stop-losses are a way for people with regular jobs to mitigate the risk of being in the market, so by having "no sympathy" for people doing their darndest hold on to their value is akin to saying they shouldn't have even been in the market in the first place.
Which brings us to the other problem. If you're not in the market (i.e. have your wealth invested in equity rather than in financial instruments) then you're going to be robbed by the Fed as it allows inflation to destroy your wealth at a
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Precisely. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Lots of OTHER people had automatic buy orders kick in when the stocks dropped, and they _made_ money on the deal. Would you be crying for them if the drop turned out to be long-term inst
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Stop-losses are a way for people with regular jobs to mitigate the risk of being in the market,
I have to say that's a bad idea. If you want an escape route that badly and you're not willing to nurse the order in near real time, then you probably shouldn't invest in that way in the first place. IMHO, stop orders are really for short term traders who find ways to work around "regular jobs", if they have them.
And yes, I have no sympathy for people who take risks with their money that they don't understand.
So, please tell us, what course of action wouldn't result in your utter contempt?
First, taking time to understand the market, the tools you plan to use, and the risks. Second, a
Markets = buttoned up betting tables (Score:3, Insightful)
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Every system can be "gamed," so get over that. However, to believe that a computer malfunction is conspiracy is itself a "naive belief." Until you've been in a system with little or no liberties, and no ability to call someone on their errant behaviors, you do not know how good life is now.
So what's your point?
Point = naive belief. So, how much do you stand to lose? In money, I meant, not puffy pride. Be careful to not get hurt, ok?
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This was just a little reminder than the "economy" is nothing more than a shared mass delusion.
You know, that's almost exactly what the Zen masters say about reality in general.