UK Trader Fined 60,000 Pounds For Outsmarting Algos

Yet another UK trader is being punished by overzealous regulators for an accomplishment that should instead have earned him accolades: Outsmarting the machines.

In a case that echoes some of the circumstances surrounding the scapegoating of former UK-based trader Nav Sarao, former Bank of America Merrill Lynch bond trader Paul Walter has been fined 60,000 pounds by the FCA for a practice that regulators call ‘algo baiting’.

Algorithm baiting is similar to spoofing – a practice that has been banned by stock-market regulators as those markets have embraced high-frequency trading practices that have broken markets and made them more vulnerable to this type of manipulation. But fixed income markets, like the Dutch loan market Walter is accused of manipulating, have been slower to embrace HFT-type trading. Because of this delay, Walter is a pioneer. Using BrokerTec, a popular fixed-income trading platform, Walter would place a bunch of bids for a given bond, triggering trend-following algos to follow suit. Then he would quickly cancel the bids. Here’s a more complete explanation per the Financial Times. 

Mr Walter entered bids for Dutch state loans that pushed up their price. Then, when other algorithmic trades followed him in response and raised their bids, Mr Walter sold to them and cancelled his quote. This happened 11 times between July and August 2014 while he was working for the bank, the FCA said, while on one occasion he did the opposite. He netted a total of €22,000 profit from this “algo baiting”.

Mark Steward, the head of FCA enforcement, said the FCA would remain “vigilant” in detecting abusive practices like “algo bating”. Of course, programmers could also build better algorithms, stamping out the practice without any help from the government.

“Market manipulation undermines market integrity and confidence. The FCA will be vigilant in detecting abusive practices and will take robust action to protect issuers and participants from all over the world from the harm caused by such abuse.”

Tellingly, Walter did not know that what he was doing was market abuse. But the FCA still found him negligent even though the regulations surrounding these aggressive trading tactics in fixed income markets are not well-defined.

According to the FCA’s register of regulated individuals, Walter became inactive in August 2014 and previously worked at UBS.

Of course, the government’s motivation in fining Walter sets an important precedent that will help regulators in the future. With the ECB tapering its bond purchases (though that’s not the terminology Mario Draghi would use), the centrally-planned markets regime that’s persisted since the crisis is about to unravel. While many Wall Street strategists and PMs remain bullish, regulators see the writing on the wall. They understand the risks that NIRP, market-distorting asset purchases and an increasing reliance on ETFs and high-frequency trading algorithms have created. And when it all comes crashing down – like it did during the May 2010 flash crash – regulators will already have their scapegoat ready.

Years after the crash, authorities arrested Sarao and blamed him for triggering the largest wipeout in market history by placing large orders for S&P 500 e-mini contracts, then cancelling them, to manipulate prices in a way that would benefit his trading positions. Sarao has insisted he did nothing wrong, but that didn’t stop the UK from extraditing him to the US, where he faces serious jail time, as we noted above.

The irony, of course, is hard to miss: Sarao, a small-time trader, is facing prison, while the architects of today’s broken markets receive accolades and are rewarded with lucrative jobs in private equity once they’re done working in government.

And just so we can relive the flash crash in all its horrifying glory, here is an video courtesy of Nanex showing trading in the e-mini future which Sarao has been accused of spoofing.

The punchline: Sarao"s orders are shown in red, and they disappear well before the most acute part of the flash crash.

 

The Crash Of '87 Remembered: "It Was Clear The Acapulco Cliff-Dive Was On For Monday"

“The markets in a panic are like a country during a coup, and seen in retrospect that is how they were that day,” wrote a young Salomon bond salesmena named Michael Lewis, of the chaos he witnessed. “One small group of people with its old, established way of looking at the world is hustled from its seat of power.”

As Bloomberg details, most of the people willing to share their memories count themselves as winners who seized the moment as an opportunity not only to make money, but also to insert themselves in the new financial order - Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Their story, and the story of Black Monday, is the birth story of modern financial markets - a wild ride of shock, angst, and, for some, glory.

In the weeks before Black Monday, a few investors spotted patterns that gave them pause.

The most confident were Paul Tudor Jones and Peter Borish, young partners at a small hedge fund in Lower Manhattan. In a prescient Sept. 24 note to investors, Jones even signed off with “caveat emptor” - buyer beware.

PETER BORISH, head of research at Tudor Investment Corp. and Paul Tudor Jones’s No. 2:

We were tracking exponential moves in the equity market. The main one was the equity move in the 1920s, and the market in 1987 looked almost identical. The week before Black Monday, the technical and fundamentals aligned, and so we thought Monday would be the day.

ALLAN ROGERS, head of government bond trading at Bankers Trust Co.:

In the first half of 1987, the bond and stock markets diverged for seven months. Bonds went straight down, equities straight up. These sorts of divergences always get my attention. In August and September, I persuaded management to cover all of our hedged short positions in sovereign fixed income, and we built up a long position in notes and bonds.

MICHAEL LEWIS, bond salesman at Salomon Brothers:

A week or two before Black Monday, Salomon announced job cuts. They chopped a few departments, including the municipal and money-market groups. It felt ill-considered and rushed. Nobody completely understood why.

ROGERS:

Nippon Tel, the Japanese telephone company, was going to do an IPO in mid-August. I thought that would pull money from other segments of the equity market. In early October there was another IPO, which I think was a very large British company. These IPOs were a big deal to me, because the main thing I pay attention to is changes in global money flow.

BORISH:

Many people thought that Japan would crash before the U.S., because Japan was more extended on fundamentals; they would be long U.S. and short Japan. We looked at the 1920s, and it was Britain, the older bull market, that went first. So we said, “No, the old goes first, because people have more hope on the new.” By the way, Japan didn’t go until 1989.

STANLEY DRUCKENMILLER, founder of Duquesne Capital Management, who was also running several funds for Jack Dreyfus’s mutual fund company:

On Friday I placed a bet that U.S. stocks would rally, on the thinking that the week’s 9 percent decline in the Dow had been overdone. Over the weekend, after studying trading charts and talking to Jack, I knew I was wrong.

While Druckenmiller considered his options that weekend, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury James Baker III told his German counterparts: “Either inflate the mark or we’ll devalue the dollar.”

PAUL TUDOR JONES, founder of Tudor Investment Corp.:

When Baker threatened a devaluation of the dollar over the weekend, it was apparent the Acapulco cliff dive was on for Monday.

JIM LEITNER, Bankers Trust FX trader:

During the day, the noise level in the trading room got quite ferocious. The chairman of the bank, who at one point had been a trader, walked onto the trading floor and stood behind my chair, which was a first.

LEWIS:

I remember walking from the 41st floor down to the 40th floor. The 41st floor was this cathedral of bonds, and then you walked down to 40 and were in this cramped, low-ceiled, dark place that was the equity department, with a lot of guys who were named Vinny and Tommy and Donny. They’d been around forever, and they had Brylcreem in their hair and big guts and they smoked too much and they were lovable. And they were all going through this visceral animal experience. People were screaming and going absolutely crazy in ways I’d never seen before. It was the first time in my career at Salomon Brothers where I was actually interested in standing beside the equity department and watching these people do their job.

JONES:

There was red everywhere, and all I could think about was how cornered the portfolio insurers were.

HOWARD MARKS, head of the high?yield bond department at Trust Company of the West:

Portfolio insurance convinced people that they could somehow own more stocks without increased risk, which is fanciful. And like all silver bullets, it didn’t work.

HARLEY BASSMAN, mortgage trader at Merrill Lynch & Co.:

As a mortgage trader, I was watching stocks in what seemed like an out-of-body experience—and yes, I was thinking 1929.

JONES:

The friends and counterparties I was speaking with were gripped with complete fear.

BLAIR HULL, managing partner of Hull Trading Co., a Chicago-based market-making firm specializing in options:

The 1987 crash is the only time I’ve ever seen the market makers scared to death.

CHANOS:

I canceled my meetings and went to a friend’s office. The few times I tried to enter orders, I couldn’t get through. The structure of the market was dependent on these technologies that were voluntary. I was trying to cover my shorts and a buyer is what they were looking for, but people were not picking up the phones. So basically I sat on my hands, which turned out to be the right thing to do.

I check into my hotel, and there’s all kinds of security. I asked what was going on: Alan Greenspan and Margaret Thatcher were both checked in as guests. I get to my room and I’m trying to call New York, but I can’t get through. I had to go to another friend’s office, because the Fed chief and his staff had basically subverted the hotel switchboard.

BORISH:

We were concerned about a lot of the counterparties and their liquidity, so the best place to be was in fixed-income futures, because if worse came to worst, we could always take delivery of the bonds.

SHIELDS:

Greenspan lands in Dallas, and the story is that when he got off the plane he asked where the market ended up. The response was “Five oh eight” and Greenspan replied: “Oh, good, it had a nice rally.” He thought it was 5.08. He had only been in office since August, so I think he was a bit of a deer in the headlights.

ROGERS:

I was so scared that I got $10,000 out of the bank, took it home, and stored it in the rafters. When I moved out, I forgot that I’d stashed the money. I think it’s still there.

JONES:

I was feeling guilty about our success. I thought we were going into the Great Depression.

BORISH:

I had 1929 on my mind. Paul and I were concerned about our friends and people who were struggling that day.

*  *  *

And here is Paul Tudor Jones" infamous live interview as the dust settled...

So what was learned from the Crash of ’87? Not much in my opinion.

As John S Lyons summed up perfectly, for starters, the laws of human nature have yet to be repealed. Additionally, high frequency trading is today’s version of program trading. Only now, instead of transmitting an order through a stock broker, who sends it to a floor broker, who give it to a trader, who takes it to a specialist at the post where the stock in question is trading, high frequency computer generated orders are automatically entered at the behest of complex algorithms and are executed and reported back in milliseconds. Witness the May of 2010 “flash crash” where the market lost about 1000 points and then mostly recovered all within 15 minutes.

In summary, risk cannot be removed from the stock market. The Crash of ’87 affected everyone. Crashes will occur again. Wear a seat belt!

*  *  *

Could never happen again...

 

Personal Recollections From The Crash Of 1987: "There Was No 'Smart Money' That Day!"

Via LyonsSharePro.com,

The following guest post is a first-hand account of the events surrounding the Crash of 1987 by JLFMI President, John S. Lyons.

Personal Recollections of the Crash of 1987 on its 30th Anniversary

“There was no ‘smart money’ that day.”

What do the assassination of President John F Kennedy, the beginning of Desert Storm and 9/11 have in common? Provided you are old enough to recall JFK’s assassination, the answer probably is that you remember exactly where you were on the day of those events. If not that old, there is most likely another event that is so memorable that you recall where you were and what you were doing at that moment.

Being in the securities business for many, many years, the Crash of ’87 on October 19th of that year is right up there with JFK’s assassination and 9/11 as one of the mind-numbing catastrophes I’ve witnessed.

In retrospect only, it was fortunate that I had entered the brokerage business in 1969 and immediately weathered a 36% market decline into 1970. On the heels of that decline, I then endured one of the worst bear markets in modern history in 1973-74 when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost almost 50% of its value. As a result, I was weaned on risk in my new profession. And I learned early on that if a career that centered around the stock market were to be endurable, I had to find a way to practice risk management.

As a result, I developed a risk model during the 1970’s as a means of guarding against such disastrous losses in the future. Fortunately, the model has been of very valuable assistance, protecting clients from every major decline since its inception in 1978. Its Sell Signals have occurred prior to insignificant declines as well, but its risk avoidance guidance supersedes those times. On September 25th of 1987, for example, our model issued a Sell Signal and I sold over half of my clients’ holdings. I was reminded just recently by an associate of mine at that time about how he passed by my office that day and was amazed at the pile of sell orders on my desk.

The Friday prior to the October 19th crash ended with the first triple digit decline in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. In total, the market lost just over 10% that week. The apprehension of professionals in the business was palpable to say the least as we entered the weekend and yet there was no seemingly immediate cause for a significant decline. I have learned that such unexplained declines are the most insidious. On Saturday night, at dinner with friends at a restaurant in Chicago, I could not eat my food!

On Monday morning, the market opened and headed south immediately. There were no buyers – just panic. Program trading, a technique supposedly providing insurance for portfolios in which computers entered sell orders at certain predetermined levels below the market, simply propelled the decline. Markets were in complete disarray. There were no bids. No one to fill the mountain of orders that were coming from all over the world. Traders left the pits crying as the carnage grew. It seemed like the end of the world – their world at least. And there was nothing stock brokers could do except watch in horror. Paradoxically, on the way home that night, the outside world was acting like nothing happened. That was no comfort.

The DJIA closed down 508 points or 22.6% that Monday, October 19th. To provide some perspective, that decline today would be the equivalent of a 5,176 point loss. The Nasdaq would have fared worse were it not for the fact that it completely failed and effectively shut down. Bid prices were often higher than asked prices. When asked what smart money was doing that day, one leading money manager admitted that “there was no smart money”.

Though most of the eventual decline was over by the close on Tuesday, the gut wrenching market action continued for the rest of the week. And its wreckage would last for weeks and months. First Options, the company charged with settling trades on the Chicago Board Options Exchange couldn’t function for weeks and had to be bailed out by its parent, the Continental Bank. Significant corporate mergers that were almost completed were canceled or at least became questionable. My only major problem during the crash – and it was a big one – was that I was selling puts on some merger candidates that were all but assured prior to the crash.

For example, I had sold hundreds of puts at a quarter of a point with a strike price of 40 on a company that was trading at the 52-53 level. All the company’s stock had to do was to close over 40/share and the puts would be worthless and the trade profitable. Instead, the stock dropped to about 37 which made the intrinsic value of the put 3. Unbelievably, they were bid at 18 for more than a week despite having negligible trading in them. Unbelievably as well, I was issued no margin calls on the positions for over two weeks due to First Options being in chaos. Unfortunately I eventually had to take sizable losses in them. In some other cases that I knew about, no margin calls were ever issued for some substantial unsecured debits. I recall one investor who had a deficit in his account of almost $250,000 and was never called to cover that amount!

When I say chaos, I mean chaos. Will it happen again? Although it is always claimed that we learn by our previous mistakes and take the appropriate steps to avoid the same problems in the future, history doesn’t bear that out. So called “reforms”, as well as proclamations such as that by Yale’s first Ph. D in economics, Irving Fisher, nine days before the stock market crash of 1929 that stock prices “reached what looks like a permanently high plateau”, are made with ultimately untimely confidence throughout history. Portfolio insurance during the ’87 crash was anything but insurance. Although it was embraced as risk management, it turned out to be risk fertilizer. Society in general always thinks that we have hit that new plateau in managing ourselves but unfortunately that is often quite the opposite. To me, the message is that we never should abandon employing some measure of risk management in investing and probably in most of our activities. So how is that accomplished?

Human Nature, The Stick in the Spokes of Risk Management

One of the phenomena that increasingly seems axiomatic is that human nature is the enemy of such risk management. The longer that one has gone without the need for caution, the more it is thought not to be needed when, in actuality, the more it is needed. This is due to a condition called perceptual recency, which simply stated means that one’s expectations of the future are the result of what one has experienced and is in their active memory. We are not good at anticipating junctures of change. That is understandable.

The following two charts show that we humans indeed clearly react to what has occurred in our memorable past. The higher we go and the longer we go higher, the more confidence we have that we will continue to go higher — and the less we feel the need for risk management. That eventually, and I repeat eventually, is injurious to one’s investing health. Note how the level of both household stock investment and consumer confidence continue to grow the higher the market goes.

So, as asked, how do we guard against the human natural tendency to dismiss the need for risk protection the higher the market goes — and to become more bearish, the lower it goes? Frankly the answer probably is that most investors, i.e., humans, cannot. I have spent a career practicing human nature avoidance in my job. Now I will admit that there will be times when the market does not need risk protection and there will be other times when there appears to be substantial risk afoot as quantified by our 40-year-old risk model but the market chooses to ignore it and continue to move higher. However, like wearing a seat belt, you cannot possibly choose to employ caution only shortly before an accident.

As stated above, declines that are the most hurtful typically begin with no seeming warning or at least before any provocation is identified. For example, on July 30, 1990, our model issued a Sell Signal and we sold 100% of our clients’ holdings. On August 2, Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait and Operation Desert Shield began — as well as a substantial decline in the stock market. Similarly, the completion of selling 100% of our clients’ holdings on account of a Sell Signal on September 4, 2001 was obviously done without any known external provocation. The lesson regarding employment of risk management is that, no, you will not know when to sell by just “having that feeling” or even more remotely, by getting tipped off by the news in the morning paper. That said, many investors do believe that they will know when to protect their holdings.

Now of course, there will be legions of market experts, many with an investment product to sell, who will say it is foolishness to even try to “time the market” as they put it. I will admit it is difficult to find a good practitioner of avoiding risk. However, one must try. Failing to avoid a substantial market decline is a double whammy. It is well quantified that losing money has twice the negative emotional impact vs. the pleasing emotional impact derived from making money. That emotional jolt on the downside is what contributes to selling at the bottom (one whammy) and makes you divorce Wall Street until it is well into its next bull phase (a 2nd whammy).

So what was learned from the Crash of ’87? Not much in my opinion. For starters, the laws of human nature have yet to be repealed. Additionally, high frequency trading is today’s version of program trading. Only now, instead of transmitting an order through a stock broker, who sends it to a floor broker, who give it to a trader, who takes it to a specialist at the post where the stock in question is trading, high frequency computer generated orders are automatically entered at the behest of complex algorithms and are executed and reported back in milliseconds. Witness the May of 2010 “flash crash” where the market lost about 1000 points and then mostly recovered all within 15 minutes.

In summary, risk cannot be removed from the stock market. The Crash of ’87 affected everyone. Crashes will occur again. Wear a seat belt!

– John S. Lyons is President and Founder of J. Lyons Fund Management, Inc.

If you’re interested in the “all-access” version of our charts and research, we invite you to check out our new site, The Lyons Share. TLS is currently running a 30th anniversary 1987 Crash Commemoration SALE, offering a discount of 22.6%, or the equivalent of the Dow’s 1-day drop 30 years ago. The SALE ends October 22 so considering the discounted cost and a potentially treacherous market climate, there has never been a better time to reap the benefits of our risk-managed approach. Thanks for reading!

*  *  *

Could never happen again...

Quant Fund Run By Three 20-Somethings Trades $1 Billion A Day

Financial markets are increasingly being dominated by quantitative and passive traders (even as quant forms have underperformed this year).

We highlighted this dichotomy earlier this year in a post titled “Quants Dominate The Market; Unexpectedly They Are Also Badly Underperforming It:”

“Two days ago, JPM"s head quant made a striking observation: "Passive and Quantitative investors now account for ~60% of equity assets (vs. less than 30% a decade ago). We estimate that only ~10% of trading volumes originates from fundamental discretionary traders." In short, markets are now "a quant"s world", with carbon-based traders looking like a slow anachronism from a bygone era.

Bloomberg confirmed as much today, when looking at another divergence between quant funds and traditional, discretionary managers: "systematic strategies have barely budged from near-record participation in U.S. stocks. Meanwhile, fundamental equity long-short managers can’t afford to be anything but picky, considering the market’s narrow leadership. The result: the largest gap on record between humans’ and computers’ gross exposure to U.S. equities, data compiled by Credit Suisse Group AG show.”

This year is shaping up to be a dismal one for so-called quant funds. Still, even as quants have failed to capture record-setting equity gains, they"ve held on to their status of Wall Street darlings, attracting the lion"s share of inflows, not to mention flattering press coverage, like this profile of one quantitative fund published by Forbes.

Domeyard, a Boston-based hedge fund founded by three twentysomethings, uses strategies pioneered by HFT prop-trading shops, sometimes executing $1 billion in trades in a day.

"We are doing on average $1 billion of daily transactions... it"s a high frequency trading strategy that is signal based."

As funds scramble to lure new investor with more attractive fee schedules, Domeyard is declining to accept a set fee in lieu of pocketing 40% to 50% of profits. According to Forbes, Domeyard operates more like an HFT shop than a hedge fund in a few notable ways, including its practice of closing out positions at the end of every trading day.

Here’s Forbes:

“Brash and optimistic, Domeyard’s founders have structured their firm as a hedge fund that doesn’t charge its investors a management fee, but does take between 40% to 50% of the profits. Qi says the firm, which currently manages in the low tens of millions of dollars, runs a low capacity strategy that currently makes between 10,000 to 40,000 trades daily. Although run as a hedge fund, Domeyard closes out its trades like many proprietary trading firms do, ending each day with no market exposure.”

The firm has attracted money from big-name investors, including Howard Morgan, a co-founder of Renaissance Technologies:

“Domeyard has raised $10 million for its general partnership from the likes of Howard Morgan, a co-founder of Renaissance Technologies who later became a venture capitalist, and Gary Bergstrom, the founder of quantitative investment firm Acadian Asset Management. Domeyard’s 14 employees include former portfolio managers who led high frequency trading teams at Quantlab, Athena Capital Research and Sun Trading, as well as former senior engineers from PDT Partners and Lime Brokerage—some of the biggest names in quantitative and high frequency trading.”

To be sure, HFT-oriented startup funds like Domeyard are facing obstacles that seem increasingly insurmountable, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out earlier this year. More banks have opened their own HFT arms, arbing away some of the profitability of industry pioneers like Virtu Financial.

For their part, Domeyard’s founders hope to find an “edge” by relying on “sequential machine learning and making large scale computations of statistics.”

“The Domeyard crew is operating in a field dominated by big firms with years of operating history that have spent fortunes on infrastructure and armies of mathematicians and engineers. In addition, this low-volatility stock market era has cut deeply into some of the richest strategies of high frequency traders, causing a wave of consolidation in the industry.

But Domeyard’s young founders think that there are some advantages to being the new kids on the high-frequency block. The firm is working to unlock profitable trading strategies by using sequential machine learning and making large scale computations of statistics. “I feel like we can do better in a lot of areas and with some technological problems because we started from scratch,” says Wang.”

Hopefully the strategy works - for their investors" sake.

Inside The "Wildest Commodity Trade" Ever... Just Don't Blink

Besides the hilariously fabricated economic data and the whole central planning bit - both of which are now everywhere these days - the one most notable feature about China"s economy and capital markets are the constantly rolling, bursting and resurrecting asset bubbles: from housing, to stocks, to bonds, to commodities, to cryptocurrencies, to pretty much anything that isn"t nailed down and can be traded, and back to housing again, the lifecycle of a Chinese assets is best expressed in terms of its "tulipness": how long before the swarming horde of Chinese bubble-chasers, armed with over $35 trillion in closed-capital account credit, latches on, bids it to the stratosphere, then sends it crashing only to repeat the cycle from scratch. And since these bubbles come ever faster and ever more furious, one has to be lightning fast to get in (and out) before it"s all over.

One such place where "if you blink, you missed it" is China’s Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange, the location of what Bloomberg has called China"s "wildest commodity trade" du jour: the buying, and selling, but mostly buying (for now) of ferrosilicon contracts. Trading in futures of the little known commodity - an alloy used to harden steel - exploded this week, as humans became veritable HFT vacuum tubes, with the average contract on Wednesday held for an estimated 39 minutes, according to Bloomberg calculations, as "investors" scrambled to buy just so they could immediately flip it to another greater fool.

And as the chart below shows, a whole lot of greater fools suddenly emerged at the start of the month.

Incidentally, the tenure of oil contracts on the NYMEX is an ancient 47 hours.

As Bloomberg"s Alfred Cang reports, "Ferrosilicon is just the latest commodity contract pounced on by China’s hordes of speculators with an intensity that makes the world’s most liquid markets look leisurely. In repeated bouts of manic trading over the past year, they’ve piled in and out of everything from cotton to zinc, eventually prompting regulators to step in and calm the frenzy."

Of course, the second regulators "step in" to  burst one bubble, the same hordes of speculators immediately shift to another, similar asset, which then becomes the next bubble du jour, and in recent days the choice has been a "hot potato" between the alloy, rebar, iron ore, siliconmanganese, and various other commodities, all of which are traded not with the intention of actually holding on to the asset, but selling it as soon as possible at a higher price, before the whole house of cards comes crashing down.

“There are large volumes of short-term investment in steel and related products such as rebar, iron ore and ferroalloy futures with investors trading momentum and sentiment,” Wei Lai, an analyst at COFCO Futures in Shanghai, said by phone.

For regular followers of China"s "investing" habits, none of the above should come as a surprise. What is surprising, is that this particular bubble hasn"t burst just yet: trading in ferrosilicon peaked on Wednesday with more than 705,000 contracts changing hands. Prices surged to a record $7,726 yuan a metric ton the previous day, up 25% this month (a move which in all honesty is tame when compared what ethereum and bitcoin have done this year).

What is also surprising, is the viciousness with which the bubble hunters swarmed this particular asset: until August, it was one of the quieter contracts on the exchange, with 22,000 contracts trading daily on average in July. Then China"s trading hordes arrived...

A spokeswoman for the exchange declined to comment to Bloomberg on the market movements: after all what can they possible say - "we keep getting overrun by an army of momo housewives"?

Overall, trading in steel and iron ore is the heaviest on China’s three commodity bourses, with volumes that dwarf contracts such as ferrosilicon. An average 7.9 million steel reinforcement bar futures traded on the Shanghai Commodity Exchange in July. Earlier this month, the bourse hiked fees and margins to calm trade in rebar after prices ran up to the highest in four years on speculation that China’s supply-side reforms are creating a shortage, and to cool the latest bubble mania. It failed.

For those curious how to calculate this particular metric, which for lack of a better phrase, we dub "bubble momentum" and bloomberg calls "commodity churnover", here is the answer:

Analysis of aggregate open interest, volumes and trading hours illustrates the extraordinary pace at which Chinese investors are trading commodities futures.

Dividing the average aggregate open interest at the end of each day by the aggregate volume shows the number of futures traded for every outstanding contract. Multiply that ratio by the number of hours in each trading day and you get an estimate for the average tenure of each contract. While Wednesday’s ferrosilicon contracts were held for less than an hour, the average for the month is 3.6 hours. Futures in Siliconmanganese, another alloy used in steel production, change hands at the fastest pace, with an average tenure in August of 2.7 hours. Iron ore is about 3.8 hours on average and rebar is 4.3 hours.

The best thing about China"s bubble factory: once the locals tire of high-frequency trading ferrosilicon, or whatever is the high speed bubble du jour, they can just move on to the next one and do it all over again.

Ex-Goldman HFT Trader Makes Blockchain History Raising $200 Million In Tezos ICO In 4 Days

Who needs IPOs when you have blockchain, and a lot of people willing to throw good money, or rather cryptocurrency, after bad something totally unknown.

Presenting the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for Tezos, a blockchain startup which has tapped a virtually unlimited source of funding, and has raised over $200 million in just four days. Tezos is already the biggest ICO in history and with the sale scheduled to continue for another 8 days, may end up raising over half a billion dollars.

Recently, blockchain startup Block.One hit a record funding, raising around $185 million in the first five days of the crowdsale. Prior to that, another startup, called Bancor, netted nearly $150 million in contributions during the first three hours of its ICO.

What makes Tezos different from a recent surge in similar such offerings, is that this ICO is not based on Ethereum and instead operates on an entirely new blockchain, a "self-amending cryptoledger" that rewards developers who upgrade the network"s protocols and allows for "seamless," consensual upgrades of those protocols (read the white paper here for more detail). Which, as Mashable points out, makes it a competitor to Ethereum.

Established by a husband and wife team, Tezos is an independent smart contract system built as an alternative to Ethereum. The platform has been under development over the last three years. Arthur Breitman and Kathleen Breitman used their extensive experience to develop the new blockchain solution.  

And here is another striking fact: Arthur Breitman previously worked at the high frequency trading desk at Goldman Sachs and served as an options market maker at Morgan Stanley. Meanwhile, Kathleen Breitman is a former management associate at Bridgewater. The startup is focused on "transparency, security and governance by consensus as fundamental design goals."

The Tezos tokens, Tezzies or XTZs, can be purchased with both Bitcoin and Ethereum, and as of this morning, there is no scarcity of demand: Tezos has already raised 53,575 BTC and 273,838 ETH, for a total of approximately $210 million at current prices. This already makes the Tezos ICO the largest in history (overshadowing the recent Bancor ICO, which raised $153 million). It may also explain the ongoing drop in ETH prices observed in recent days.

Another important point: unlike many recent ICOs, the Tezos ICO is uncapped, meaning there"s no upper limit of funds the company can raise, what is likely to drive a widespread distribution of tokens. Initially the token sale was planned to start in the middle of May, but at the last minute was postponed to June.

The only limit is time, and with approximately 8 days and 14 hours to go, the ultimate amount Tezos will raise will likely be a lot bigger than it is now. 

As Reuters reported in May, Tezos received investment from venture capitalist Tim Draper, which attracted additional interest to the startup. Draper is also going to invest in the US-based Dynamic Ledger Solutions Inc, the developer of Tezos. The details of the investment were not disclosed. According to Coinspeaker, Draper first unveiled his desire to take part in Tezos’ token offering in May, thus becoming the first prominent VC investor to participate in an ICO. Some industry players are still concerned about the possible risks of token sales and the lack of regulatory control.

Draper believes that by investing in the startup he will set an example for other investors to embrace this new type of funding. Another well-known American entrepreneur, Mark Cuban, unveiled that he is going to participate in his first ICO.

Of course, the interest may wane in the coming days, and the ultimate amount Tezos will raise depends on the highly volatile Bitcoin and Ethereum cryptocurrencies. As Stan Schroeder points out, the price of both BTC and ETH has fallen considerably in the last several weeks; if they were anywhere near their all-time highs (which they were around the time of the Bancor ICO), Tezos would already be sitting on more than $250 million. It is unclear if the recent drop in cryptos is linked to the giant ICO.

Another notable similarity between Tezos and Bancor is that both startups are "incredibly ambitious, with intent to change the cryptocurrency landscape forever. Some hot names are on both companies" teams; for example, venture capitalist Tim Draper has invested in both companies. And both companies have been criticized in the cryptocurrency community for letting their fundraisers collect insane amounts of money."

It"s crazy how many worst practices Tezos has incorporated into its crowd sale yet people still give them money

— Evan Van Ness (@evan_van_ness) July 1, 2017

I will not be participating in the #tezos #ICO tomorrow. Most ridiculous ico I"ve ever seen. Think twice and do the research b4 investing

— Max Kaplan (@maxekaplan) June 30, 2017

Many have already warned about the easy and facility with which ICO can raise funds, and Tezos is no different: it is worrisome to see startups that have barely launched their first finished product raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

"Tezos (...) do have a solution that could mitigate some of the issues seen with other blockchain tokens through their governance model," Charles Hayter, CEO of CryptoCompare, told Mashable in an emailed statement. But he, like many others, warned that uncapped ICOs are problematic. 

"ICO"s which are uncapped are dangerous as they imply and show a complete disregard for corporate discipline - and to an extent an element of disrespect for the investor. The question that needs to be asked is can the job be done with less money (...) and that throws a spotlight on the fairness & truthfulness of the proposition being offered," he said.

Yet despite growing criticisms, Tezos" ICO is proof that token crowdsales are still incredibly hot, both for traders looking to earn a quick buck by flipping new tokens and for crypto-related startups looking to get funded. Over-the-roof valuations will make it increasingly hard for these crowdfunded startups to prove their worth, and as Schroeder warns, "it feels like some sort of crash is inevitable, but it hasn"t happened yet."

A "Mysterious Antenna" Emerges In An Empty Chicago Field; Billions Depend On It

Readers are familiar with the various microwave and laser arrays located at the real New York Stock Exchange in Mahwah, New Jersey, both of which we have written about in the past.

Microwave tower located next to the NYSE in Mahwah, NJ.

This article, however, is not about the familiar antennas off Route 17 in New Jersey. Instead, demonstrating to what lengths the high frequency traders will go for just a few millisecond advantage - which makes in the HFT world makes all the different between billions in profits and losses - Bloomberg reports that a mysterious antenna has emerged in an empty field in Aurora, near Chicago, and a trading fortune depends on it.

Strange? Of course: as BBG"s Brian Louis admits "it was an odd transaction from the outset: $14 million, double the going rate, for a 31-acre plot of flat, undeveloped land just west of Chicago. In the nine months since, the curious use of the space has only added to the intrigue. A single, nondescript pole with two antennas was erected by a row of shrubs. Some supporting equipment was rolled in. That’s it."

As it turns out, those antennas - as readers may imagine - were anything but ordinary. Same goes for the buyer of the property: anything but your typical land investor, although the name will be all too familiar to those who have followed our reporting on HFT over the years: it was Jump Trading LLC, "a legendary and secretive trading firm that’s a major player in some of the most important financial markets."

Equipment on land purchased by an affiliate of Jump Trading

Jump Trading affiliate World Class Wireless purchased the 31-acre lot for $14 million, according to county records. “They paid probably twice as much as it’s worth,” said David Friedlandof Cushman & Wakefield. “I don’t see anyone else paying close to that price.”

There was a reason why Jump overpaid so much: it was an investment into guaranteed future returns.

Because ultimately the purchase was all about the location: just across the street lies the data center for CME Group, the world’s biggest futures exchange. By placing its antennas so close to CME’s servers, Jump hopes to shave maybe a microsecond off its reaction time, enough to separate a winning from a losing bid in trading that takes place at almost the speed of light. Enough to make billions in profits if done successfully millions of times every minute for year.

As Bloomberg describes the land grab, "it was the latest, and perhaps boldest, salvo in an escalating war that’s being waged to stay competitive in the high-speed trading business."

The war is one of proximity -- to see who can get data in and out of CME the quickest. A company called McKay Brothers LLC recently won approval to build the tallest microwave tower in the area while another, Webline Holdings LLC, has installed microwave dishes on a utility pole just outside the data center.

“It tells you how valuable being just a little bit faster is,” said Michael Goldstein, a finance professor at Babson College in Babson Park, Massachusetts. “People say seconds matter. This is microseconds matter.”

It also tells you something else: at its core, modern trading is simply about being faster than your competition: no thinking goes into the trade, only reaction times matter. That, and frontrunning your competition. Some more details about this literal land grab:

In October 2015, McKay Brothers, a company that sells access to its microwave network to high-speed traders, leased land diagonal to the CME data center, under the name Pierce Broadband LLC, according to DuPage County property records.

Last month, the county gave McKay approval to erect a 350-foot high microwave tower that could be 600 feet closer to the data center than its current location, records show. Two trading firms, IMC BV and Tower Research Capital LLC, own minority stakes in McKay. Co-founder Stephane Tyc said his firm may never build the tower but it would be part of the firm’s continual efforts to speed transmission time.

Then there’s Webline Holdings. In November 2015, it was granted a license to operate microwave equipment on a utility pole just outside the data center, according to Federal Communications Commission records. Webline has licenses for a microwave network stretching from Aurora to Carteret, New Jersey, where Nasdaq Inc.’s data center is located. Messages left for Webline were not returned.

Back to the mysterious antenna: according to Bloomberg, the license for the transmission dishes is held by a joint venture between World Class and a unit of KCG Holdings, another HFT trading firm that was recently acquired by Virtu Financial. In other words, the "who is who" of HFT has been unleashed on an empty field near Chicago, and to the builder will go the spoils.

It could be billions in revenues.

* * *

After all this frentic building of microwave tower, who is closest to the CME servers? It is unclear. Trading data first leaves CME computers via fiber cable, and then to nearby antennas that send it by microwave to other towers until it reaches New Jersey, where all the major U.S. stock exchanges house their computers. The moves in Aurora are intended to reduce the time that the data is conveyed through cable; the practical impact is shaving off a millisecond or maybe even a few nanoseconds.

At its core, the race is about latency arbitrage, and not being the slowest firm on the block - a recipe for financial ruin. Sending data back and forth between the U.S. Midwest and East Coast allows high-frequency traders to profit from price differences for related assets, including S&P 500 Index futures in Illinois and stock prices in New Jersey. Those arbitrage opportunities often last only tiny fractions of a second.

Ironically, all the land grab and overpriced land purchases could be made obsolete with one simple decision: a microwave tower could be installed on the roof of the CME data center to eliminate the need for jockeying around the site, the same way the NYSE has a microwave tower next to its NJ headquarters. The exchange is indeed looking at allowing roof access, along with CyrusOne, the company that bought the data center last year, CME said in a statement. Traders being traders, however, they may continue to battle, this time for the most advantageous position on the microwave tower itself.

“We are confident the CME can provide an alternate and better solution which offers a level playing field to all participants," said McKay’s Tyc.

Which is ironic because at its core, modern High Frequency Trade is about everything but a level playing field: after all there are millions of traders to be frontrun, take that away, and the HFT parasites of the world have no advantage whatsoever.

"It's Alive" - Copper Algo Goes Wild While No One Was Watching

"Twas the eve of President"s Day and nothing was stirring (in Europe, China, or US markets) except that is, a wild algo in the LME copper pits...

Late Monday evening in London, with all but a few die-hard traders in China were asleep, the European workday was ending and Americans had a public holiday, "Franken-copper" was born.

As Bloomberg reports, for traders still watching their screens, the reason behind whipsawing moves in London copper was obvious: an algorithmic trading system had gone off the rails, said Guy Wolf, global head of market analytics at commodities brokerage Marex Spectron Group Ltd.

For half an hour, copper zigzagged by almost $100 on the London Metal Exchange. More than 2,200 contracts traded between 6 p.m. and 6:35 p.m., the most for that time of day since 2012.

Sudden jolts in markets, often called flash crashes, are becoming more frequent as markets become increasingly complex and fragmented.

In recent years, the LME has tried to attract more high-frequency traders and modernize its systems to boost liquidity and trading on the exchange. The move has attracted some criticism from veterans such as Michael Farmer, co-founder of hedge fund Red Kite, who warned last year that algorithmic funds were creating an uneven playing field.

“Algorithms will blindly follow the tasks they are set within the parameters they are given,” said Wolf. “As markets become increasingly electronic, we often see high levels of intraday volatility for brief periods that ultimately result in little overall price movement.”

Citadel Pays $22 Million Settlement For Frontrunning Its Clients

Last May we reported that, after years of railing against Citadel"s dominant position at the intersection of HFT trading and retail orderflow - Citadel was recently found to be the largest private US trading venue - Federal authorities were investigating the market-making arms of Citadel LLC and KCG Holdings looking into the possibility that the two giants of electronic trading are giving small investors a poor deal when executing stock transactions on their behalf.

As a reminder, Citadel is so big and its own private stock-trading platform is so large that, if it were an official exchange recognized by the Securities and Exchange Commission, it would one of the largest registered exchanges in the United States - bigger than Nasdaq. Citadel Execution Services, the firm’s wholesale market-making unit, recently executed 35% of all trades by retail investors in U.S.-listed stocks.

It was this retail trading giant that authorities were probing, and specifically looking at internal data concerning the firms’ routing of customer stock orders through exchanges and other trading systems, to see whether they are giving customers unfavorable prices on trades in order to capture more profit on the transactions.

In other words, the DOJ is looking into whether Citadel is frontrunning its clients, something we have claimed for years.

So what would happens if the DOJ did find what has been obvious to most market participants for years, namely that Ken Griffin"s firm was frontrunning retail orderflow fore years?

As we summarized at the time, if authorities do move ahead, they would be marching forcefully into the debate over high-speed trading. Critics of HFT, such as this website, have alleged that firms with the fastest trading technology are using speed to manipulate stock prices, giving investors a raw deal. The industry counters that its technology delivers cheaper and more transparent trades to investors.

It also delivers guaranteed profits to itself, because while on one hand Citadel is a massive market-maker, responsible for the biggest portion of retail flow traffic, on the other it happens to be the most leveraged hedge fund in the world in terms of regulatory to net assets.

* * *

Or maybe nothing at all. Because fast forward to today, when without much fanfare at all, Citadel announced it would pay $22.6 million to settle allegations that it "misled clients about pricing trades", a euphemism for it was frontrunning its clients.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, soon to be run by a former deal lawyer who was particularly close to Goldman Sachs, said in a statement on Friday that Citadel, without admitting or denying the findings, had agreed to pay $5.2m disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, plus interest of $1.4m, in addition to a $16m penalty.

The SEC found precisely what we had said all along: that the company"s business unit handling retail suggested to its broker-dealer clients that it would internalize retail orders to provide the best price, but it used algorithms that failed to perform the task from 2007 to 2010; i.e. Citadel was actively trading against the best interests of its clients, and adverse in its own best interests.

"These two algorithms represented a small part of Citadel Securities" internalization business, but they nevertheless affected millions of orders placed by retail investors because of Citadel Securities" large role in that market," said Robert Cohen, co-chief of the SEC enforcement division"s market abuse unit.

Citadel, which has since discontinued use of the algorithms, said in a statement Friday that it takes legal compliance "very seriously." 

Today, Citadel Securities resolved an issue related to the adequacy of certain disclosures from late 2007 to January 2010. We take very seriously our obligations to comply fully with all laws and regulations. As the market leader we are committed to providing superior service and execution quality to our clients each and every day.

To those who want to see a Citadel internalizer algo in action, we recommend you read the following article by Nanex" Eric Hunsader, who explains the entire process: "Retail Trades Disadvantaged by Direct Feeds  Internalizers buy at the direct feed price, sell to retail at the SIP feed price."