Latest / Masters in Business / Themis Trading LLC Joseph Saluzzi: Masters in Business (Audio)
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. Hi,
- 0:08Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. This is Barry rid Holts and
- 0:11Speaker 1: my guest today is Joe Saluzi. You probably know him
- 0:16Speaker 1: as co author of the book Broken Markets or a
- 0:20Speaker 1: blog poster at Famous Trading. He's actually UH an institutional trader,
- 0:26Speaker 1: agency trader, agency broker on behalf of big mutual funds,
- 0:31Speaker 1: hedge funds, what have you. Joe and his partner sal
- 0:34Speaker 1: were very early in identifying problems with markets with market structures.
- 0:41Speaker 1: They identified some glitches from algorithmic trading, from high frequency trading,
- 0:46Speaker 1: issues with dark pools, and they've been a pretty vocal
- 0:50Speaker 1: set of um more than critics, but participants in the
- 0:55Speaker 1: markets who want to make them better, fairer, less expense
- 1:00Speaker 1: of uh more even handed for for all participants. Uh
- 1:04Speaker 1: they've brought a lot of um let's call it malfeasance
- 1:08Speaker 1: to the public's attention. Their first white paper had come
- 1:12Speaker 1: out in two thousand eight, right in the middle of
- 1:13Speaker 1: financial crisis, when no one was thinking about things like
- 1:16Speaker 1: market structure. But once we had the two thousand and
- 1:19Speaker 1: ten flash crash, I think people started paying a whole
- 1:22Speaker 1: lot more attention to them. I know these guys probably
- 1:27Speaker 1: for five or six years, um, through the usual circuits, radio,
- 1:31Speaker 1: TV conferences, what have you. You know, it's a really
- 1:34Speaker 1: small world and you end up bumping into them. Today's
- 1:37Speaker 1: conversation is a little technical, a little wonky. If you
- 1:40Speaker 1: find this sort of stuff interesting, I think you'll find
- 1:43Speaker 1: it fascinating. Uh. There are very very few people who
- 1:47Speaker 1: are as as knowledgeable from a trading perspective about market
- 1:51Speaker 1: structures and potential flaws in what's going on. And you'll hear.
- 1:57Speaker 1: You know, things have gotten better for the flash crash,
- 2:01Speaker 1: but not nearly as as good as as Joe and
- 2:04Speaker 1: sal would like to see them. Um. So that's a positive,
- 2:07Speaker 1: but you know, we're still not quite there, and there's
- 2:10Speaker 1: still risk of another flash crash, not only in equities,
- 2:14Speaker 1: but as we've seen in treasuries, in currencies. It turns
- 2:19Speaker 1: out that commodities maybe the best structured market there is
- 2:23Speaker 1: because they have some inherent rules and inherent structures built
- 2:27Speaker 1: in that work better than some of these other markets.
- 2:30Speaker 1: So I could keep babbling about this for hours, but
- 2:32Speaker 1: rather than do that, let's just go right to my
- 2:35Speaker 1: conversation with Joe Saluzzi. Of Famous Trading. This is Masters
- 2:43Speaker 1: in Business with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. My guest
- 2:47Speaker 1: this week is Joe Saluzzi of Famous Trading. Him and
- 2:51Speaker 1: his partner are the authors of Broken Markets. How high
- 2:54Speaker 1: frequency trading and predatory practices on Wall Street are destroying
- 2:58Speaker 1: investor confidences and hurting your portfolios. Joe, Welcome to Bloomberg.
- 3:04Speaker 1: Very thick, great, thanks for having me here today. So
- 3:06Speaker 1: I wanted to have you guys on, and by coincidence,
- 3:09Speaker 1: it works out that you follow a week where we
- 3:11Speaker 1: had a quant Cliff ast Nest fascinating conversation, but he's
- 3:15Speaker 1: been a fairly he calls it tepid defender of high
- 3:19Speaker 1: frequency trading before. So so it just turned out fortuitously
- 3:24Speaker 1: that we have you on the week after UM and
- 3:27Speaker 1: coming up we have Brad Katsuyama from i X and
- 3:30Speaker 1: he's also going to discuss market structures. But before we
- 3:33Speaker 1: get into the nitty gritty of this, a little background
- 3:36Speaker 1: about yourself. UM finance, bachelor's at n y U and
- 3:40Speaker 1: then an NBA at Chapel Hill down at North Carolina.
- 3:45Speaker 1: Before you, guys founded Famous Trading, you worked at instant
- 3:48Speaker 1: at But the question I really have to ask is
- 3:51Speaker 1: how did you find your way into investigating issues in
- 3:57Speaker 1: market structure. Yeah, that's a great question. And if you
- 4:00Speaker 1: to ask me, you know, five or eight years ago,
- 4:02Speaker 1: would we be here saying absolutely not. You know, our
- 4:04Speaker 1: our job is to trade stocks. That's what we do
- 4:06Speaker 1: for a living. Where agency brokers, we trade for institutional clients,
- 4:10Speaker 1: hadge funds, mutual funds, and so on. But we got
- 4:12Speaker 1: our start as you mentioned, Sal and I both worked
- 4:14Speaker 1: at Instant in the nineties, in early nineties before electronic trading,
- 4:18Speaker 1: just as electronic trading was really taken off in the
- 4:20Speaker 1: equities business, so we kind of we cut our teeth
- 4:23Speaker 1: trading electronically. We learned a lot there, We really saw
- 4:26Speaker 1: it progressing, and then started to see the rule changes
- 4:29Speaker 1: happening mainly at the SEC some things like regg ets
- 4:32Speaker 1: and a few other regulations. So let's let's get into
- 4:35Speaker 1: that in a little bit. But for for the lay
- 4:37Speaker 1: person who may be listening to this and not familiar
- 4:39Speaker 1: with Instant, I began my career as a trader, So
- 4:42Speaker 1: you had either a level two or level three depending
- 4:44Speaker 1: on the access, whether you were buyer or whether you're
- 4:47Speaker 1: making markets and Instant. It was a private network that institutions.
- 4:52Speaker 1: Institutional network used to buy and sell stocks with each
- 4:56Speaker 1: other when they maybe were trading a little outside of
- 4:59Speaker 1: the market, outside of the been asking moving real size
- 5:03Speaker 1: so as to not disrupt the market. Is that a
- 5:05Speaker 1: fair Yeah, that that was its original intent exactly you said. Um.
- 5:09Speaker 1: Eventually brokers came on the system, just like today, finding
- 5:13Speaker 1: liquidity was tough back then when you had two institutions
- 5:16Speaker 1: trying to cross stock, they didn't exactly always meet. Brokers
- 5:19Speaker 1: were then allowed on the system, but the real action
- 5:21Speaker 1: on Instant was between institutional investors was blocking up stock,
- 5:25Speaker 1: was trying to put up fifty a hundred thousand shares
- 5:28Speaker 1: without moving the stock. And and that's the trick and
- 5:31Speaker 1: even today there's still the trick to the trading stocks
- 5:33Speaker 1: is trying to find a piece of liquidity, trying to
- 5:35Speaker 1: find that block without having the noise come through and
- 5:38Speaker 1: a lot a lot of that excess leakage. So that's
- 5:40Speaker 1: what our job was. Our job was to facilitate trades.
- 5:43Speaker 1: We weren't prop traders or any agency guys just like
- 5:45Speaker 1: we are now. So so you traded on behalf of
- 5:47Speaker 1: endowments foundations truss hedge funds, which were much moller way
- 5:51Speaker 1: back then. Mutual funds were the big boys on the
- 5:54Speaker 1: block in those days, and so your business were commissioned brokers.
- 5:58Speaker 1: You would get paid for the trade you executed on
- 6:01Speaker 1: their behalf right and even better, actually the clients had
- 6:03Speaker 1: the system on their desk themselves, so we were actually
- 6:06Speaker 1: we were more coverage people. So we covered an account
- 6:09Speaker 1: and whether it's you know, you kind of helped that
- 6:11Speaker 1: account along, but they can actually hit the keys themselves.
- 6:14Speaker 1: They didn't need us. And the power that the buy side,
- 6:16Speaker 1: particularly the institutional investment community got, that was the first
- 6:19Speaker 1: time where they were really involved in the process and
- 6:21Speaker 1: they really liked it, which is why the instant revenue
- 6:24Speaker 1: stream went like a ski slope from the early nineties.
- 6:26Speaker 1: It really ramp. It was so from back in the nineties.
- 6:30Speaker 1: What has changed in the markets? A lot, uh, well,
- 6:35Speaker 1: a lot for the good, A lot for so you know,
- 6:37Speaker 1: we're known as critics and so on, but we don't
- 6:39Speaker 1: we see a lot of good that has come over
- 6:41Speaker 1: over the last ten fifteen years in the market. Narrowing spreads,
- 6:45Speaker 1: lower commission costs um and that came about really around
- 6:48Speaker 1: two thousand and two that's when decimalization came out, when
- 6:51Speaker 1: they changed those audits and quarters right that we were
- 6:54Speaker 1: trade actions and everybody back, everybody who was on a
- 6:57Speaker 1: trading desk knew what teenys were teeny the courts even
- 7:01Speaker 1: it was crazy stuff. It was sixteenth of a of
- 7:05Speaker 1: a cent. And I was good at doing math in
- 7:07Speaker 1: my head, but a lot of people had a hard
- 7:09Speaker 1: time with it. Decimalization was good for the people who
- 7:12Speaker 1: were a little fractionally challenged. Let's call it absolutely a
- 7:15Speaker 1: good thing. Um. One thing that they forgot about was,
- 7:18Speaker 1: you know, putting in some sort of minimum spread. But
- 7:20Speaker 1: we can get to that later when it comes to
- 7:21Speaker 1: small caps. But really, electronic trading is what brought down
- 7:25Speaker 1: the cost of trading right today. There could be this
- 7:27Speaker 1: whole argument, we can get into it later about high
- 7:29Speaker 1: frequency trading and whether or not that increased or decreased cost.
- 7:32Speaker 1: But the real fact, and you look at charts and
- 7:34Speaker 1: you can see this transaction cost for institutional investors dropped
- 7:39Speaker 1: around two thousand and two, two thousand and three four,
- 7:42Speaker 1: that's when the real drop and the real decline came in.
- 7:45Speaker 1: Since so oh seven, we're oh, wait, we've kind of
- 7:47Speaker 1: leveled off. We haven't. We've gone down and we've pretty
- 7:49Speaker 1: much stay down there. So that drop in trading costs,
- 7:52Speaker 1: did it imbute to the advantage of the investor the institution?
- 7:56Speaker 1: Where did that squeezing of margins end up falling? That
- 8:00Speaker 1: that should go directly to an investment because you're a
- 8:02Speaker 1: if you're a hedge fund or an investment advisor and
- 8:03Speaker 1: you have fees and expenses, transaction costs is certainly one
- 8:07Speaker 1: of them, or at least explicitly commissioned costs. You know,
- 8:10Speaker 1: there's more of an implicit transaction costs, which will you know,
- 8:13Speaker 1: we talk about all the time on the on the
- 8:14Speaker 1: institutional world, is how much does it costs you to
- 8:16Speaker 1: really get into it and out of that stock? How
- 8:19Speaker 1: much leakage was there? Did you move the stock a
- 8:21Speaker 1: certain amount, did you get the v wap the volume
- 8:24Speaker 1: weight at average price, or did you actually increase it
- 8:26Speaker 1: because you left a lot of trails and that that
- 8:28Speaker 1: is really what implicit transaction cost is, and that, you know,
- 8:32Speaker 1: that's one of those things that's kind of stayed the
- 8:34Speaker 1: same over the last few years. So the approach of
- 8:36Speaker 1: big institutions, or at least it used to be and
- 8:39Speaker 1: I'm assuming to some degree it still is is to
- 8:42Speaker 1: be a little stealthy and to try and get these
- 8:44Speaker 1: trades off without just you know, the signs in the
- 8:48Speaker 1: marina are at this point on it's five miles per hour,
- 8:51Speaker 1: no wake. They don't want to leave a giant wake
- 8:54Speaker 1: in the market. They want to sneak in and sneak out.
- 8:56Speaker 1: And really that's my job, my real job now, and
- 8:58Speaker 1: when we're not writing books and writing log posts, to
- 9:01Speaker 1: trade for clients and to leave is little weak and
- 9:03Speaker 1: that's a great way of looking at it as possible
- 9:05Speaker 1: so that others aren't pretty much attaching to what you're doing.
- 9:09Speaker 1: And it's difficult, even though everyone thinks that there's all
- 9:11Speaker 1: electronics and algorithms and whatnot, it is really difficult to
- 9:14Speaker 1: make sure that you're not being spotted and taken advantage of.
- 9:17Speaker 1: And that's how you lower your transaction costs. You lower
- 9:19Speaker 1: them by not being spotted. I'm Barry ridd Holts. You're
- 9:22Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest
- 9:25Speaker 1: today Joe Saluzzi of Famous Trading, co author of the
- 9:29Speaker 1: book Broken Markets. Let's continue our conversation a bit about
- 9:34Speaker 1: what you've described as a market structure that's become broken.
- 9:39Speaker 1: So we were talking earlier about the nineties, how things
- 9:43Speaker 1: change today, They've changed a lot when it comes to
- 9:45Speaker 1: the actual who's trading lot and the types of players
- 9:49Speaker 1: that are out there, and the the diversity of liquidity
- 9:52Speaker 1: and diversity of market participants. So what we found out,
- 9:54Speaker 1: and I'll just back up in real quickly, we found
- 9:57Speaker 1: as we were trading throughout the middle of two thousands too,
- 10:00Speaker 1: thousand and six, two thousand and seven, two thousand and
- 10:02Speaker 1: eight really changed a lot. And there was a reason
- 10:05Speaker 1: why it changed a lot, and it was because of
- 10:06Speaker 1: a regulation called Reagan MS that the SEC approved. That's
- 10:10Speaker 1: the National market system. What what did that regulation do?
- 10:14Speaker 1: It pretty much exploded the equity universe. Were used to
- 10:18Speaker 1: have particularly listed names on the ux dock scene, names
- 10:21Speaker 1: where there was a specialist down on the floor and
- 10:23Speaker 1: a human was actually buying and selling and and setting
- 10:26Speaker 1: the price correct. And they had about eight percent market
- 10:29Speaker 1: share on the New York Stock Exchange pre oh seven,
- 10:31Speaker 1: pre Reagan MS. Now they're around and that dropped on
- 10:35Speaker 1: was overnight as soon as the rule was put in place.
- 10:37Speaker 1: Reagan MS, basically it was intended to help competition. It
- 10:40Speaker 1: wanted to allow other exchanges and other venues to post
- 10:43Speaker 1: their bids and offers and have people interact with them
- 10:46Speaker 1: and not ignore those quotes. Conceptually, that's a great idea.
- 10:49Speaker 1: You should have to trade with a venue that has
- 10:51Speaker 1: a better price, right well thinks, in other words, the
- 10:53Speaker 1: best bit. So if you're a seller, you should your
- 10:57Speaker 1: broker who's operating in your half, on your behalf, be
- 11:00Speaker 1: hitting the highest bid, the best bid as opposed to
- 11:03Speaker 1: just what's most convenient. That's exactly it. And and one
- 11:05Speaker 1: of the parts of the rule is called the Trade
- 11:07Speaker 1: through Protection or rule six eleven. And that's what it says.
- 11:10Speaker 1: If the best bid or offer before you can trade,
- 11:13Speaker 1: let's say you say the best offers ten cents before
- 11:15Speaker 1: you can trade a fifteen cents, you've got to clear
- 11:17Speaker 1: the ten cents. So that for a block trader that
- 11:19Speaker 1: becomes potentially a problem. You've got to kind of sweep
- 11:21Speaker 1: through those levels, which we can do through what they
- 11:24Speaker 1: call electronic give They have an ISO orders into market
- 11:27Speaker 1: sweep boarders with. But the bottom line was, all of
- 11:29Speaker 1: a sudden, once this this fragmentation with the sec called competition,
- 11:33Speaker 1: we call fragmentation it allowed noise and different types of
- 11:38Speaker 1: venues to start coming through. And that's where the games began.
- 11:42Speaker 1: And that's where the high speed traders, the high frequency
- 11:44Speaker 1: traders as their so called, so they invent they started
- 11:47Speaker 1: coming in. So let's define that, because I know people
- 11:49Speaker 1: are gonna say, I hear about h f T. I
- 11:52Speaker 1: hear about, but what are high frequency traders? Really? It's
- 11:55Speaker 1: a great question. And I was on a CFTC subcommittee
- 11:58Speaker 1: and the and the job of our sub committee was
- 12:00Speaker 1: to define high frequency trading, and we really didn't come
- 12:03Speaker 1: up with a very good definition. I actually dissented to
- 12:05Speaker 1: a public and when they finally came up with it,
- 12:07Speaker 1: because it's really hard to define. It's it's it's not
- 12:10Speaker 1: exactly you know, it's certainly obviously using speed and using
- 12:13Speaker 1: technology to you know, it's and we think it's certainly
- 12:16Speaker 1: a matter of when it comes to inventory and net
- 12:18Speaker 1: positions being close to zero at all times. They're not
- 12:21Speaker 1: holding huge positions, although they could be long one particular
- 12:24Speaker 1: options contract and short the stock, or a long an
- 12:27Speaker 1: ETF and short the future. But at the end of
- 12:29Speaker 1: the day, the net kind of neutral. They're not carrying
- 12:31Speaker 1: any inventory. They're in and out very very quickly, very
- 12:35Speaker 1: short holding periods exactly well, and now some of them
- 12:38Speaker 1: will hold and and actually now we're starting to see
- 12:40Speaker 1: some public statements. There's an s one out there from
- 12:42Speaker 1: one particular HIPT. They're holding positions, but they're usually being
- 12:45Speaker 1: netted out against others. And we don't necessarily have a
- 12:48Speaker 1: problem with a high frequency trading market maker. I don't
- 12:52Speaker 1: have a problem if there I want to trade with
- 12:54Speaker 1: any participant in a market, in a pool that's all
- 12:57Speaker 1: trading on a transparent and fair way. Why wouldn't I
- 12:59Speaker 1: want to trade? Diversity is a good thing. We take
- 13:02Speaker 1: issue with some of the high frequency traders who are
- 13:04Speaker 1: more when there's lots of pinging and sniffing, and and
- 13:07Speaker 1: we can get into exactly how this goes. So let
- 13:09Speaker 1: me ask you a series of questions, or rather than that,
- 13:13Speaker 1: I'm gonna give you one word and I want you
- 13:15Speaker 1: to define it. And I have about ten of these.
- 13:18Speaker 1: We'll see how far these go. Let's start with co
- 13:21Speaker 1: located servers. A co location is you can put your
- 13:24Speaker 1: server at the New York Let's use the New York
- 13:26Speaker 1: Stock Exchange facility right next to the main matching engine,
- 13:29Speaker 1: which sits in Mahwah, New Jersey, not on you with
- 13:31Speaker 1: you know, the stock change is not on Wall Street,
- 13:33Speaker 1: it's in Mahwah, New Jersey. You can rent a cabinet
- 13:36Speaker 1: they call it a cage and put your server in there.
- 13:40Speaker 1: It's got an equal length cord just like everybody else
- 13:42Speaker 1: in the facility to get to that engine. If the
- 13:45Speaker 1: trick is to be as close as possible so that
- 13:47Speaker 1: you can see the data coming at or process the
- 13:50Speaker 1: data as fast as possible before your competitors a process
- 13:54Speaker 1: so relative to co location, let's talk about latency arbitrage.
- 13:59Speaker 1: Great question, Okay, So lazy RB is basically the matter
- 14:01Speaker 1: of having two separate quotes. What I mean is if
- 14:05Speaker 1: I was a high speed trader and I can build
- 14:08Speaker 1: my own quote. So what I do is there's twelve,
- 14:10Speaker 1: there's eleven stock exchanges soon to be twelve again. But
- 14:13Speaker 1: what you would do is you would take all those
- 14:14Speaker 1: stock exchanges, get a direct data feed into them, co
- 14:17Speaker 1: locate your computers and basically take out any sort of
- 14:20Speaker 1: latency or time to little delay and create a quote.
- 14:24Speaker 1: Will create an NBBO, a national best bit or offer
- 14:26Speaker 1: that is most likely going to be faster than what
- 14:30Speaker 1: the public sees because they see it through something called
- 14:32Speaker 1: a SIP or a security information processor. So there's a
- 14:35Speaker 1: difference in time, and there will always be a difference
- 14:38Speaker 1: in time because the SIP has to aggregate all of
- 14:41Speaker 1: those various exchanges or eleven or twelve and then show it,
- 14:45Speaker 1: whereas if you're just doing one, you could be a
- 14:46Speaker 1: little well, you're doing your own and you're picking and choosing,
- 14:49Speaker 1: and you're creating your own quote. And the problem with
- 14:51Speaker 1: the SIP is that NASDAC, the for profit exchange, runs
- 14:55Speaker 1: the SIP. They're actually the provider of the SIP for
- 14:57Speaker 1: a couple of years. Last year I had a little
- 14:59Speaker 1: problem with the SIP, and the question became, are they
- 15:01Speaker 1: spending enough money upgrading the technology so that the SIP
- 15:05Speaker 1: is as fast as everyone else? And currently it used
- 15:07Speaker 1: to be around a millisecond time delay. Now it's at
- 15:10Speaker 1: a half of the millisecond. It sounds like nothing, right,
- 15:12Speaker 1: but a half of a millisecond, So I Frequency Trader
- 15:14Speaker 1: was all the time in the world. We'll talk a
- 15:16Speaker 1: little bit about flashboys later, but the book begins with
- 15:20Speaker 1: the story of creating a fiber op to cable in
- 15:23Speaker 1: a perfectly straight line from New York to Chicago in
- 15:28Speaker 1: order to shave a couple of minutes, literally a couple
- 15:31Speaker 1: of milliseconds off trading. And the guys who did that
- 15:34Speaker 1: spent a billion dollars on it, and it was an
- 15:36Speaker 1: enormous return on that investment. Let's keep going. What is
- 15:41Speaker 1: quote stuffing? Quote stuffing is a theory. It's never been
- 15:44Speaker 1: proven at the SEC, but it certainly does seem to
- 15:46Speaker 1: exist what we've seen evidence of it. Nan X by
- 15:49Speaker 1: the way, he puts out these fabulous graphics showing all
- 15:52Speaker 1: these giant surges of quotes that show up for a
- 15:56Speaker 1: millisecond and then disappear. Incredible work that NanoX eric over
- 15:59Speaker 1: And now I mean he could be he should be
- 16:01Speaker 1: working for the SEC. That the amount of data that
- 16:03Speaker 1: he processes, things that he sees, it's amazing that the
- 16:06Speaker 1: folks in that the SEC or the other regulators don't
- 16:08Speaker 1: see this, which kind of scares us a bit. But
- 16:10Speaker 1: quote stuffing is that if stocks trade on what they
- 16:13Speaker 1: call channels, is maybe there's eight is eight D in
- 16:16Speaker 1: one channel e F and another. If if you're looking
- 16:19Speaker 1: at stock in the A channel, you can kind of
- 16:21Speaker 1: go after another stock send through a whole bunch of
- 16:24Speaker 1: quotes and then kind of extract out that to make
- 16:26Speaker 1: your processing faster. It's an interesting theory and it's certainly
- 16:30Speaker 1: that it's been proven. It's actually been talked about in
- 16:32Speaker 1: some regulatory documents as well. I'm Barry rid Helts. She
- 16:35Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest
- 16:38Speaker 1: today is Joe Saluzzi. He is one of the partners
- 16:41Speaker 1: of Famous Trading and the co author of Broken Markets
- 16:45Speaker 1: and a long standing critic of market structures, high frequency
- 16:49Speaker 1: trading and some of the other things that we discuss
- 16:53Speaker 1: that works uh to the investors disadvantage. Earlier we were
- 16:57Speaker 1: discussing um things like co okay ation and packet sniffing.
- 17:01Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit before we get to the
- 17:03Speaker 1: flash crash. Talk a little bit about spoofing and walking away.
- 17:08Speaker 1: What what is spoofing. Spoofing is placing bids are offers
- 17:11Speaker 1: where you have no intention of trading them, and there's
- 17:14Speaker 1: actually been a couple of cases just recently. The CFTC has,
- 17:17Speaker 1: by the way, has much more the Commodity Futures and
- 17:19Speaker 1: Trading Commission much more power now under Dodd Frank to
- 17:22Speaker 1: go after spoofers than the SEC does. It's kind of
- 17:25Speaker 1: a weird thing where how it was written in the rules,
- 17:27Speaker 1: But they've come after a couple of guys recently and
- 17:29Speaker 1: have settled a few cases where folks or these firms
- 17:32Speaker 1: high speed firms, because you really you could manually spoof,
- 17:35Speaker 1: but it's really not going to be effective. But they
- 17:37Speaker 1: were basically placed layering the book really, which is another
- 17:39Speaker 1: term layers, so at different prices, a whole bunch of
- 17:41Speaker 1: orders that look like there's a big buy or look
- 17:44Speaker 1: like there's a big seller to move the price, and
- 17:46Speaker 1: then of course as soon as someone comes in they
- 17:48Speaker 1: cancel all those orders gone. There's never an intention, and
- 17:51Speaker 1: that's the thing, and how do they prove that. It's
- 17:53Speaker 1: an intense se scenario. And the CFCC again has a
- 17:56Speaker 1: lot more leeway. So if you're a few, if you're
- 17:58Speaker 1: a guy in the in the future, his world, and
- 18:00Speaker 1: you're spoofing, you should be a little scared now because
- 18:02Speaker 1: the CFCC has a much much more powerful regular relation
- 18:05Speaker 1: that they can use against you. I mean, isn't that
- 18:07Speaker 1: really an attempt to manipulate markets with no intention to
- 18:11Speaker 1: actually execute a trade? Yes, And that's exactly one of
- 18:14Speaker 1: the problems that we have with certain high speed trading
- 18:16Speaker 1: or any trader for that matter. You know, we're we're
- 18:19Speaker 1: critics of of potential problems in the market of market structure.
- 18:22Speaker 1: Spoofing has no business being in the market, right, So
- 18:25Speaker 1: here's my proposal. Tell me what the result of this is.
- 18:28Speaker 1: If you want to put a bit of a quote
- 18:29Speaker 1: out there, you have to have it stay there for
- 18:32Speaker 1: a tenth of a second? Is am I being ridiculous
- 18:35Speaker 1: or what's the know? And and we actually had recommended
- 18:37Speaker 1: that once also, But the the high speed community the
- 18:39Speaker 1: other side will say that that's going to mess up
- 18:41Speaker 1: their models. They can't place bids and offers and therefore
- 18:44Speaker 1: they can't arbitrage certain scenarios. Let's let's say it's an
- 18:47Speaker 1: et F arbitrage ore and he's gonna under you know,
- 18:50Speaker 1: he's gonna trade five hundred stocks against the SMP five
- 18:52Speaker 1: hundreds if he's forced to place a bitter offer for
- 18:55Speaker 1: a tenth of a second, which you know, I'm blinking
- 18:57Speaker 1: our eyes in ridiculous. You know, we certainly wouldn't have
- 19:00Speaker 1: a problem with that. They would scream bloody murder. And
- 19:03Speaker 1: then here's the flip side. They're gonna say, well, if
- 19:05Speaker 1: you do that, I'm gonna take away my quote unquote
- 19:07Speaker 1: liquidity and I'll be gone. And that's where everyone gets scared.
- 19:10Speaker 1: So now let's let's talk about walking away, which is
- 19:13Speaker 1: going to lead us to ultimately to the flash crash.
- 19:16Speaker 1: You know, when you had a specialist down on the exchange,
- 19:19Speaker 1: they were there theoretically to provide an orderly market. They
- 19:23Speaker 1: were ready, willing and able to to buy or sell
- 19:26Speaker 1: stocks at an equilibrium price. Uh. The counter argument, as
- 19:30Speaker 1: you go back to and hey down one day, I
- 19:35Speaker 1: think that was a different era. You know, everything was
- 19:38Speaker 1: fairly manual back then. But that taking away the liquidly Uh.
- 19:44Speaker 1: Don't they have essentially no obligation to make a market?
- 19:48Speaker 1: Can't they just walk away anytime they want? Spot on exactly?
- 19:51Speaker 1: And that's the problem. Obligations are nowhere to be found
- 19:55Speaker 1: in the market making community anymore, although they will tell you.
- 19:58Speaker 1: I mean some of the exchanges have an obligation of
- 20:01Speaker 1: eight percent within the n b b O, which means
- 20:03Speaker 1: you can, quote, for a want to wait on a
- 20:05Speaker 1: hundred all of stock, Thank you very much, I'll take you. Know,
- 20:07Speaker 1: you can have that liquidity, But if you don't have
- 20:09Speaker 1: an oblimy. That's a touch more than the flash crash. Well,
- 20:13Speaker 1: we had stub quotes then they were trading mid zero, right,
- 20:15Speaker 1: that was how crazy was that? But you know, people
- 20:18Speaker 1: will say the specialist system, they were problems and they
- 20:20Speaker 1: land them with handcuffs and all. If there were problems,
- 20:23Speaker 1: and they were, we would call those out if we
- 20:24Speaker 1: were back in the nineties. Right now, sal and I
- 20:26Speaker 1: will be talking about problems back in the specialist world,
- 20:28Speaker 1: because that doesn't get rid of a hold of these problems. Right,
- 20:32Speaker 1: But let's think about it. At least the specialists had
- 20:34Speaker 1: what they call an affirmative and a negative obligation, which
- 20:37Speaker 1: means they had to buy stock at certain times and
- 20:39Speaker 1: they couldn't sell its other times. And the customer knew that,
- 20:42Speaker 1: and there was there was the confidence. So let's let's
- 20:46Speaker 1: talk about the flash crash. May six, two thou and ten.
- 20:50Speaker 1: All of a sudden, the down plummets. I remember this
- 20:53Speaker 1: because I was on a flight back from Dallas. I
- 20:55Speaker 1: missed it. But and every time I fly now people
- 20:58Speaker 1: point out that the market gets color crush, But um,
- 21:02Speaker 1: what happened. What happened on that day? That was an
- 21:05Speaker 1: evaporation in liquidity basically, right. And let me read you
- 21:08Speaker 1: just a real quick quote from after the flash. Crasty
- 21:11Speaker 1: sec CFTC Advisory Committee put out a report which we
- 21:14Speaker 1: thought was one of the best pieces that ever came
- 21:16Speaker 1: out of DC. Listen to these words they said talking
- 21:18Speaker 1: about the flash crash. Indeed, even in the absence of
- 21:21Speaker 1: extraordinary market events, limit order books can quickly empty and
- 21:25Speaker 1: prices can crash simply due to the speed and numbers
- 21:28Speaker 1: of orders flowing into the market and due to the
- 21:30Speaker 1: ability to instantly cancel orders. So the books emptied. There
- 21:35Speaker 1: was a situation, there was grease going on like there
- 21:37Speaker 1: is today, right, same, sorry. And then there was a
- 21:39Speaker 1: supposedly a large e mini order in the futures market.
- 21:42Speaker 1: Not it was an order, right, and by the way,
- 21:46Speaker 1: it was a seventy contract order, which half of it
- 21:49Speaker 1: wasn't even executed until after this was over, So it
- 21:52Speaker 1: really is kind of an it's a bad excuse, and
- 21:55Speaker 1: it wasn't the cause. The cause was the market was
- 21:57Speaker 1: on pins and needles. The bids and offers just evaporated.
- 22:00Speaker 1: And there was a professor, actually he was at the
- 22:02Speaker 1: CFCC that his name is Andre Carolinko. He turned the
- 22:05Speaker 1: phrase hot potato trading where they basically the h f
- 22:08Speaker 1: T guys started flipping back and forth between each other
- 22:11Speaker 1: until their position limits got exhausted, and then they just
- 22:14Speaker 1: walked away. And there was even one in the market
- 22:15Speaker 1: that said he hit the button h f T stop,
- 22:18Speaker 1: which meant get me out. Everything was done. Everybody just
- 22:21Speaker 1: walked away. I'm Barry rit Helps. You're listening to Masters
- 22:23Speaker 1: in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My guest today is Joe Saluzzi.
- 22:28Speaker 1: He is the co author of Broken Markets with his
- 22:31Speaker 1: partner Sal Arnuck. The two of them run Famous Trading,
- 22:34Speaker 1: and we were previously discussing the causes of the flash crash,
- 22:40Speaker 1: so let's let's go back to that. So it's May
- 22:43Speaker 1: two thousand and ten, and suddenly stocks that normally trade
- 22:47Speaker 1: at eight are a penny. The Dow loses some crazy
- 22:53Speaker 1: I almost want to say ten percent. Is that a
- 22:55Speaker 1: bullpark number? In a matter of minutes and a half
- 22:58Speaker 1: hour later, everything come snapping back as if it was
- 23:02Speaker 1: no big deal. How on earth does that happen in
- 23:05Speaker 1: the twenty one century in America? Yeah, I think they're
- 23:08Speaker 1: still looking into that, the regulators, right, But it happened,
- 23:12Speaker 1: you know. But basically the problem a lot of the
- 23:14Speaker 1: retail investor's face was folks who had stop loss orders
- 23:17Speaker 1: in there. If a stock got to a certain level,
- 23:19Speaker 1: they wanted to sell it. Those stop losses became market
- 23:21Speaker 1: orders once they activate, well they really what happens with
- 23:24Speaker 1: a market order. Normally it'll get sent over to what
- 23:27Speaker 1: they call an internalizing broker. They will normally pick up
- 23:30Speaker 1: this market order. They'll trade against it because they consider
- 23:32Speaker 1: retail flow dumb. I'm sorry, that's that's their word's not mine,
- 23:36Speaker 1: and they want to basically give it a subpenny price improvement,
- 23:39Speaker 1: and then they're off they and they're trying to trade against.
- 23:41Speaker 1: In this scenario, the internalizers tend they walked away as well.
- 23:44Speaker 1: So these market orders got exhausted to the let exchanges
- 23:47Speaker 1: over New York and to the NASDAC and there was
- 23:50Speaker 1: no bids or offers there. So what does a market
- 23:52Speaker 1: order do. It goes down and starts looking for the
- 23:54Speaker 1: best bit or offer until it finds something. And even
- 23:58Speaker 1: and even at selling Johnson and John's in it, Accentura
- 24:01Speaker 1: was traded at a penny of share, so I think
- 24:03Speaker 1: was Sam Adams too, which is whatever's stock price now
- 24:05Speaker 1: a penny of share. It was absurd and it was
- 24:07Speaker 1: basically it was called a stub quote, where a market
- 24:10Speaker 1: maker could place a one sided quote. So he'll put
- 24:12Speaker 1: a penny bid offered at a hundred dollars whatever it
- 24:14Speaker 1: may be. Say, you know, the SEC has since bann
- 24:17Speaker 1: stub quotes. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was
- 24:19Speaker 1: why did that market or to come into the system
- 24:21Speaker 1: and have no bids or offers. Why did the limit
- 24:23Speaker 1: order books that we talked about before just disappear? Well,
- 24:26Speaker 1: it's not really real liquidity. It was kind of a
- 24:28Speaker 1: phantom liquidity. It's there when you don't need it, and
- 24:31Speaker 1: when you really need it it disappears. That's the big crew.
- 24:34Speaker 1: That's one of my big complaints bearing him on sooon
- 24:37Speaker 1: and disappears in the draft. So so so, there are
- 24:40Speaker 1: some people who I've actually had on the show and
- 24:43Speaker 1: had conversations with. Jack Brennan is chairman of the Vanguard Group.
- 24:47Speaker 1: Cliff Astness, the c i O of of a q R,
- 24:50Speaker 1: who have said high frequency trading and the modern competition
- 24:54Speaker 1: have made costs of execution lower. They've tightened spreads, they've
- 24:59Speaker 1: done the number of things, although the reality is, you know,
- 25:02Speaker 1: the spread is tightened, but it's for forty seven shares.
- 25:04Speaker 1: If you have to buy five thousand shares, is the
- 25:06Speaker 1: spread is still ten or twenty or thirty cents. But
- 25:10Speaker 1: when when the chairman of Vanguard said, hey, this has
- 25:13Speaker 1: made our costs a lot lower, how do we argue
- 25:16Speaker 1: against that? Well, that's wonderful for Vanguard, who makes money
- 25:19Speaker 1: on you know how many trillions of ETFs they have
- 25:21Speaker 1: right now, three trillion dollars. It's you know, I wouldn't
- 25:25Speaker 1: want local, you know. But for them, it's a different
- 25:27Speaker 1: business model, right they're running something and for a quant
- 25:30Speaker 1: it's a different business mode because they're flipping in and
- 25:32Speaker 1: out of numerous, numerous positions throughout the day. But we're
- 25:36Speaker 1: talking about a traditional institutional and investor who's trying to
- 25:39Speaker 1: buy a hundred thousand shares of a stock that trades
- 25:41Speaker 1: a million shares. Things have changed dramatically for them because
- 25:45Speaker 1: that footprint they're leaving is basically the one that everyone's
- 25:48Speaker 1: trying to pick off. That liquidity that's there disappears quickly.
- 25:52Speaker 1: The obligations of a market maker are no longer. They're
- 25:55Speaker 1: the average trade size now on both lit and dark venues.
- 25:59Speaker 1: Is less than two hundred chairs, less than two Trade says,
- 26:02Speaker 1: it's incredible. How do you get anything done? So when
- 26:04Speaker 1: we look at the flash crash, what's to prevent that
- 26:08Speaker 1: from happening again? Nothing? Okay? What about that on a
- 26:13Speaker 1: D do stop? Well, you won't have the O and
- 26:16Speaker 1: U and A ninety two. So in other words, they'll disappear.
- 26:18Speaker 1: But they don't have to be there. They don't have
- 26:20Speaker 1: to know that well they would, you know, to be
- 26:22Speaker 1: considered a market maker, you have to be there. But
- 26:23Speaker 1: if you can easily just shut it off and say
- 26:25Speaker 1: I'm not going to be a market maker right now,
- 26:26Speaker 1: but get to do that for the day, all right,
- 26:30Speaker 1: And that means that the exchange won't give you the
- 26:32Speaker 1: special pricing that they give to these market makers. But
- 26:34Speaker 1: just as an example, October fifteenth of last year, there
- 26:38Speaker 1: was a flash crash in the Treasury mark Remember, okay
- 26:41Speaker 1: that that day should be on everybody's on the blackboard,
- 26:44Speaker 1: just like May six was. That was a very very
- 26:46Speaker 1: disturbing event because that's the most liquid acid in the
- 26:48Speaker 1: world and it crashed in a matter of minutes and
- 26:51Speaker 1: then it's zapped right back again. Just like the equity mark.
- 26:54Speaker 1: Bigger move was the yields are from my two tents
- 26:56Speaker 1: and one. I think it was huge in minutes and
- 27:00Speaker 1: apparently no, we know it's a Ukraine situation. Whatever. It
- 27:03Speaker 1: was the same scenario, But why did the treasury market
- 27:05Speaker 1: now that it's a known fact that high frequency traders
- 27:08Speaker 1: are now in the treasury market. Electronic trading has taken
- 27:10Speaker 1: over the treasury market. So it's the same scenario that,
- 27:14Speaker 1: like I read before, limit order books can quickly evaporate,
- 27:17Speaker 1: and that's what we're dealing with. So our our issues.
- 27:19Speaker 1: How do we build those limit order books again? How
- 27:21Speaker 1: do we put diverse liquidity back into there where people
- 27:23Speaker 1: feel comfortable that they're not gonna get picked off all day?
- 27:26Speaker 1: So you're sided. In the book Flash Boys, which was
- 27:31Speaker 1: Michael Lewis's book, I actually read it on vacation last year,
- 27:34Speaker 1: and his books are perfect beach reading. I find them
- 27:38Speaker 1: both entertaining and and informative. And we'll have to get
- 27:42Speaker 1: Michael on the show one of these days. But you
- 27:45Speaker 1: guys are mentioned in there. Tell us a little bit
- 27:47Speaker 1: about what took place in that book and what some
- 27:50Speaker 1: of the solutions to high frequency trading are coming down
- 27:55Speaker 1: the pipe because we've been hearing h f T is
- 27:58Speaker 1: less profitable than it used to be. Either, there's a
- 28:00Speaker 1: ton of competition. The rule changes have affected them somewhat.
- 28:04Speaker 1: What what's happening now? Well, the book was usually the
- 28:07Speaker 1: book was tremendous just to get to debate really moving forward.
- 28:10Speaker 1: And we've been struggling with this since oh eight, right,
- 28:12Speaker 1: so two thousand and eight we were at our first
- 28:14Speaker 1: white paper. We've been you know, we were on sixty
- 28:15Speaker 1: minutes and two thousand intent. It's been a long time,
- 28:17Speaker 1: a long struggle. Michael Lewis came in like a steam
- 28:20Speaker 1: roller and everyone is talking about which is fantastic, but
- 28:22Speaker 1: you know, he used the word rigged, which really got
- 28:25Speaker 1: people from sixty minutes. Michael Lewis said, the markets are rigged.
- 28:29Speaker 1: Do you agree with that? The structure of the market
- 28:33Speaker 1: is ragged. Okay, they're they're are forces. The stock exchange
- 28:37Speaker 1: model is broken there, they're poor profit companies that have
- 28:40Speaker 1: different incentives than they should have now. They used, for
- 28:44Speaker 1: people who may not be familiar with this, for most
- 28:46Speaker 1: of their histories, The New York Stock Exchange was a
- 28:49Speaker 1: nonprofit entity up until the whole situation with their former
- 28:55Speaker 1: chairman getting paid bonuses that they wasn't supposed to when
- 28:58Speaker 1: you're running a nonprofit, that ultimately lead um okay, well,
- 29:02Speaker 1: if you don't want to take a bonus as a nonprofit,
- 29:05Speaker 1: let's become for profit company. Right, and it changed their
- 29:07Speaker 1: philosophy a change. Okay, we're now for the bottom line.
- 29:10Speaker 1: We have to return money to investors because that's what
- 29:12Speaker 1: public companies do. Right. NASDAC, for instance, has less than
- 29:15Speaker 1: ten percent of their money generated from equity cash transactions.
- 29:19Speaker 1: That means stock market So where's old money coming from?
- 29:22Speaker 1: Data sales? Various things related to co location data feeds,
- 29:27Speaker 1: which is a huge profit generator for stock exchanges. So
- 29:30Speaker 1: they're and even one stock exchange is owned by brokers. Okay,
- 29:33Speaker 1: there's used huge conflicts of interest in the stock exchange model,
- 29:37Speaker 1: which has created the problems that we see in what
- 29:39Speaker 1: they call these smart order routers from the broker level,
- 29:42Speaker 1: where they go to one exchange first because that offers
- 29:45Speaker 1: a better rebate than it does from another exchange, or
- 29:48Speaker 1: they go to a dark pool because it doesn't charge
- 29:50Speaker 1: them anything. Define dark pools for listeners. Sure, dark pools
- 29:53Speaker 1: are off exchange venues that don't need to publish their quotes.
- 29:57Speaker 1: Back in the day, when I was an instant that
- 29:58Speaker 1: we called it a crossing net work at night because
- 30:00Speaker 1: we wanted the cross chunks of stock. Now they operate
- 30:03Speaker 1: throughout the day. And an average trade size on a
- 30:05Speaker 1: dark pool is no bigger than a lip pool now
- 30:07Speaker 1: less than two hundred shares. But but back then it
- 30:09Speaker 1: was big and fifty blocks. And there's still a couple
- 30:12Speaker 1: of dark pools now liquid that in particular that's still
- 30:14Speaker 1: over forty shares on the average trade size. Those are
- 30:17Speaker 1: institutions crossing stock, reducing transaction costs. And some may say, well,
- 30:21Speaker 1: you're shutting out the retail investor. No you're not, because
- 30:24Speaker 1: those institutions are trading on behalf of retail fund, that
- 30:28Speaker 1: retail money in an individual stock exactly. So that argument
- 30:33Speaker 1: doesn't hold any water. But dark pools themselves have been
- 30:36Speaker 1: so perverted and so over the years. What the Barkley's
- 30:40Speaker 1: case that the a g and York Attorney General is
- 30:42Speaker 1: brought against the Barkley's dark Pool, which is still pending,
- 30:45Speaker 1: exposed a lot of what actually goes on inside and
- 30:48Speaker 1: the lack of disclosion, the lack of transparency that the
- 30:52Speaker 1: clients of the dark pools don't have no idea, They
- 30:54Speaker 1: have no idea who's getting teared and who gets the
- 30:56Speaker 1: order first. These are the problems inside the market structure
- 30:59Speaker 1: when you talk about the term rigged, that do exist,
- 31:02Speaker 1: that do advantage one class of investor over another, that
- 31:05Speaker 1: need to be taken out of the market. If we're
- 31:07Speaker 1: playing on a level playing field, we've got absolutely no
- 31:10Speaker 1: problem with any high frequency trading low I don't care
- 31:13Speaker 1: who you are, low frequency guy. I want to interact
- 31:15Speaker 1: with every piece of liquidity, but I want to do
- 31:17Speaker 1: it on a fair and level playing field. So let's
- 31:19Speaker 1: talk about the new exchange i e X, which solves
- 31:24Speaker 1: some of these problems. Absolutely. We're a trading We were
- 31:27Speaker 1: one of the first trading partners. You know, we think
- 31:29Speaker 1: i X. They nailed it with their model. They got
- 31:31Speaker 1: rid of rebates. Okay, there's no there's a flat fee
- 31:34Speaker 1: on the I X exchange. You pay what whether you
- 31:36Speaker 1: make the liquidity or take a liquidity one feet. They
- 31:39Speaker 1: got rid of the speed advantage by putting in something
- 31:42Speaker 1: you know, Brad will tell you more than I need
- 31:43Speaker 1: to buffer. And essentially it's a mile of spooled uh.
- 31:47Speaker 1: Fiber optics, nobody has any advantage of of speed. The
- 31:52Speaker 1: order comes in and then it gets buffered for a
- 31:54Speaker 1: millisecond and now everybody's arriving at the same time. That's right.
- 31:57Speaker 1: And they took away the gaming that goes on in
- 32:00Speaker 1: other systems. And they'll tell you about who types of
- 32:03Speaker 1: clients they have. But a lot of h f T
- 32:05Speaker 1: guys don't want to go there because it's not profitable.
- 32:08Speaker 1: But for us, as institutional traders, we love systems like that.
- 32:11Speaker 1: We'll get our average trade size is much bigger on
- 32:13Speaker 1: I X than is on any other venue. That that
- 32:16Speaker 1: is a very very good system. You get clean liquidity,
- 32:19Speaker 1: you're crossing things up nice. That's what you're supposed to have.
- 32:22Speaker 1: So the market here's a great example. The market is
- 32:24Speaker 1: now starting to solve its own problems, wonderful without the
- 32:27Speaker 1: regulators mucking it up more than they've done already. So
- 32:31Speaker 1: before we um uh and the radio portion of our interview,
- 32:35Speaker 1: if people want to read some of your white papers,
- 32:37Speaker 1: where where can they find out more about this? Sure?
- 32:39Speaker 1: We run a bog actually femist trading dot com. We
- 32:42Speaker 1: have a blog that we'll put out maybe three or
- 32:44Speaker 1: four posts a week that we normally every topical issues
- 32:46Speaker 1: on market structure. Obviously our book Broken Markets, white papers
- 32:51Speaker 1: are on the website as well image trading and and
- 32:53Speaker 1: you know we don't charge for these. We don't put this.
- 32:55Speaker 1: This is not a business model for us. Well, this
- 32:57Speaker 1: is this is a passion. This is what we do.
- 32:59Speaker 1: We invent, stickate things, and then we trade based on
- 33:01Speaker 1: what we learned. Okay, welcome back to the podcast. If
- 33:05Speaker 1: you're listening to this, it means you already heard the
- 33:08Speaker 1: radio portion of our show, and now I get to
- 33:11Speaker 1: stop worrying about the time segments and actually just relax
- 33:14Speaker 1: and enjoy chatting with my guests. I know Joe for
- 33:18Speaker 1: we know each other for a good couple of years.
- 33:20Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out where I met you and
- 33:22Speaker 1: Sal could have been at a conference one of the
- 33:24Speaker 1: could have been certainly spoke at your conference years back,
- 33:27Speaker 1: which was great. And we end up we've done a
- 33:29Speaker 1: couple of shows together. We always you know, it's a
- 33:31Speaker 1: small universe that you end up bumping into each other. Um,
- 33:35Speaker 1: I recall it was before the flash crash, it was
- 33:40Speaker 1: when h f T really first started rearing its head.
- 33:44Speaker 1: I want to say it was before the financial crisis.
- 33:47Speaker 1: I want to say, oh seven could have been when
- 33:49Speaker 1: did you first notice things were getting a little, you know,
- 33:53Speaker 1: funky when you were trading? We we noticed it's certainly
- 33:56Speaker 1: like an oh five, oh six. Our first white paper
- 33:58Speaker 1: was the end of oh eight, so that's when we
- 33:59Speaker 1: publish something called Toxic Equity Trading, which kind of sat
- 34:02Speaker 1: on the shelf for a while. Everybody missed it because
- 34:03Speaker 1: we're in the mid financial crisis, and yeah, no one
- 34:06Speaker 1: really cared about market structure. It really popped up in
- 34:08Speaker 1: July of oh nine when the Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Lichnikov,
- 34:12Speaker 1: and all of a sudden people started googling what's this
- 34:14Speaker 1: high frequency trading? And they popped up our white paper,
- 34:17Speaker 1: and then our phones lit up. There was a phenomenal um.
- 34:21Speaker 1: There was a phenomenal blog post. And I'm trying to
- 34:24Speaker 1: remember who first round it. I wouldn't be surprised if
- 34:26Speaker 1: it was Zero Hedge about who is this guy that
- 34:30Speaker 1: Goldman Sachs says that has escaped with the keys of
- 34:34Speaker 1: the castle and if unchecked, he could bring the market.
- 34:39Speaker 1: It was that the FBI. So where the hell did
- 34:41Speaker 1: these guys get that from? They had to have someone
- 34:44Speaker 1: from Goldman whispering in there, and and and Sergey is
- 34:46Speaker 1: still being prosecuted. He's still going through criminal eventually. And
- 34:51Speaker 1: you read the story, he essentially took open source stuff
- 34:55Speaker 1: that he had that basically was just a thing of convenience.
- 34:58Speaker 1: And uh and by the way, a lot of this
- 35:00Speaker 1: is actually in Flashboys. But the prosecution for that sham
- 35:05Speaker 1: on Guldman Sacks for for what they did. Don't cross
- 35:08Speaker 1: the squid apparently not or the Matt Taibi has is
- 35:12Speaker 1: still around Nobody's uh no, but nobody's He's the guy
- 35:15Speaker 1: who coined the phrase a jamming. It's blood funnel into
- 35:19Speaker 1: the throat of America of the vampire squid. If you
- 35:23Speaker 1: remember that very very famous article. It stayed with us.
- 35:26Speaker 1: So we we blew through a lot of stuff due
- 35:28Speaker 1: to time constraints earlier. Let me let me ask you
- 35:31Speaker 1: a few more questions that that we missed. So we
- 35:34Speaker 1: talked about improved trading costs and spreads and liquidly. The
- 35:38Speaker 1: one thing that we really didn't get to um that
- 35:41Speaker 1: I wanted was the difference between h f T s
- 35:45Speaker 1: and specialists or market makers. For that that fact, what
- 35:49Speaker 1: is the legal obligation what is the differences between what
- 35:53Speaker 1: they do and what they used to be required to do? Well,
- 35:57Speaker 1: that's to say, what exactly what is their obligation to
- 35:59Speaker 1: buy and sell a certain amount of shares? There is none,
- 36:02Speaker 1: And actually there's a couple of h f T s.
- 36:04Speaker 1: Now the bigger market makers are arguing for more obligations.
- 36:08Speaker 1: They want the guys who really understand that the h
- 36:10Speaker 1: f T market makers, you really know what they're doing,
- 36:12Speaker 1: who have really figured this out and are not necessarily
- 36:14Speaker 1: gaming the system, want more obligations. Give me some names.
- 36:18Speaker 1: I can't get into all the specifics, but there was
- 36:20Speaker 1: a what else do you put in that category? Well,
- 36:24Speaker 1: I don't know if I would put them in those
- 36:25Speaker 1: in the positive, I haven't seen those two guys asking
- 36:27Speaker 1: from more obligations. I did see a letter coming and
- 36:30Speaker 1: the tick size pilot program, which has been proposed by
- 36:33Speaker 1: the SEC. Virtue actually wrote a piece in their letter
- 36:36Speaker 1: which I thought was really impressive, asking them to put
- 36:39Speaker 1: more obligations on electronic market makers that, okay, let's step
- 36:43Speaker 1: up to the plate. How about the rest of those guys?
- 36:45Speaker 1: Do they want obligations? Now? Does this give a big
- 36:47Speaker 1: company like Virtue and uh An advantage. Is it a
- 36:50Speaker 1: competitive advantage or are they saying, hey, let's not kill
- 36:53Speaker 1: the golden goose here. I think they're they're pretty tight
- 36:56Speaker 1: on their market making. They pretty much. I mean they look,
- 36:58Speaker 1: they just published the next on and in there is
- 37:00Speaker 1: you know, a second time around for them going trying
- 37:02Speaker 1: to get that I p O out. But they've exposed
- 37:04Speaker 1: pretty much everything they do. They're not afraid to talk
- 37:06Speaker 1: about it. I would love to have some of these,
- 37:08Speaker 1: more of these one name h f T s that
- 37:10Speaker 1: you never heard of, that have a web page of
- 37:12Speaker 1: a half a page. Let them talk about their business model.
- 37:15Speaker 1: Are they making markets or they just you know, a
- 37:17Speaker 1: bunch of guys in a few different pods who are
- 37:19Speaker 1: looking at what what we call front running, which is
- 37:22Speaker 1: not really what they're doing. But what they're doing is
- 37:24Speaker 1: because they have no customers. By the way, all h
- 37:26Speaker 1: f t s are prop traders with no customers. They're
- 37:28Speaker 1: not what I describe as front running. You're actually right
- 37:31Speaker 1: because I'm mischaracterizing it. What they're doing is they're buying
- 37:36Speaker 1: a data service from the exchange which allows them to
- 37:39Speaker 1: packet sniff. It allows them to see orders not after
- 37:44Speaker 1: they hit the exchange. After they are traded. They like
- 37:47Speaker 1: it lets them see customer orders, not their customers, someone
- 37:52Speaker 1: else's customers, those orders before they're executed, so they get
- 37:56Speaker 1: to run ahead of them. If we all go the
- 38:00Speaker 1: front running, it's running ahead. But we were actually what
- 38:03Speaker 1: they're doing. And here's what they'll I'll put my h
- 38:05Speaker 1: f T ahead and they'll say that no, no one
- 38:08Speaker 1: can see an order before anyone else. It gets released
- 38:11Speaker 1: from the exchange server at the exact same time, and
- 38:14Speaker 1: anybody who spends the amount of money, the millions necessary
- 38:18Speaker 1: to process it can see that order. But guess what not.
- 38:21Speaker 1: You know, most people aren't doing what they do, So
- 38:23Speaker 1: we think what they're doing is not front running because
- 38:26Speaker 1: it's a customer but it's front running of demand and
- 38:28Speaker 1: front running of supply. They're building the book. They're looking
- 38:31Speaker 1: for what they call book pressure, and when they see
- 38:33Speaker 1: a stocks about to move based on their speed advantage
- 38:36Speaker 1: off and going right, so they're taking that offer before you.
- 38:39Speaker 1: They're canceling that bid before they get hit so they
- 38:41Speaker 1: don't get run over. Because essentially they're just trading getting
- 38:44Speaker 1: out of positions throughout the day. Their front running demand
- 38:47Speaker 1: and front running supply. Technically, nothing legal about that. Now,
- 38:51Speaker 1: as a broker, if I had a client order for
- 38:52Speaker 1: ten thousand shares and I decided to buy ahead of that,
- 38:54Speaker 1: I go to jail, as I should because that's front running.
- 38:57Speaker 1: That's that's legal front But Mike takeaway has always been,
- 39:01Speaker 1: you know, it's a zero sum game. And if these
- 39:04Speaker 1: guys are are capturing a penny on a hundred thousand shares,
- 39:08Speaker 1: that means the quote unquote natural buyer is not getting
- 39:12Speaker 1: that penny, and you multiply it by all of the transactions,
- 39:16Speaker 1: and that means tens of billions of dollars of profit
- 39:19Speaker 1: each year that should be in Grandma's IRA or your
- 39:24Speaker 1: four oh one k simply aren't there. It's going to
- 39:28Speaker 1: the h f T farms. Yes, it's going to proprietary
- 39:31Speaker 1: traders who are basically extracting that for their own and
- 39:34Speaker 1: not providing a social value. That's the key question. Are
- 39:37Speaker 1: they providing They're not going back into the ecosystem of
- 39:41Speaker 1: the trading world. Think about the old days when you
- 39:43Speaker 1: had an investment bank that had a trading department, a
- 39:45Speaker 1: research department, I p o s all sorts of different areas,
- 39:49Speaker 1: and in the trading department actually was a loss leader.
- 39:51Speaker 1: At times they would lose money to facilitate the other
- 39:54Speaker 1: parts of the business. But there you had the real
- 39:56Speaker 1: purpose of a stock market was to help companies go
- 39:59Speaker 1: pub right, bring them out, put them on road shows.
- 40:02Speaker 1: That's kind of falling aside because the economics aren't there
- 40:04Speaker 1: any right, the economics of the research department. Now you
- 40:08Speaker 1: talked about earlier how great decimalization is. I've read a
- 40:12Speaker 1: number of people complaining that when we went from fractions
- 40:14Speaker 1: to decimalizations, you you took a lot of the profit
- 40:18Speaker 1: out of trading, and that profit was what subsidized research.
- 40:22Speaker 1: Is that true? Yeah, And actually there's something called a
- 40:24Speaker 1: tick size pilot which has just been proposed. We wrote
- 40:27Speaker 1: a comment letter, the industry wrote tons of comment letters
- 40:29Speaker 1: on it. But the theory there is decimalization was great,
- 40:32Speaker 1: but you never put in a minimum spread. In other ways,
- 40:35Speaker 1: you collapse the spreads down to a penny. Wouldn't it
- 40:37Speaker 1: make sense for stocks that or even dying, for say
- 40:41Speaker 1: a small cap that doesn't trade. We're trying to attract
- 40:43Speaker 1: real liquidity, and real liquidity providers are not going to
- 40:46Speaker 1: hang around when they're gonna get picked off by somebody
- 40:48Speaker 1: who has a penny to come in play in the game.
- 40:51Speaker 1: Where now, if it was a nickel and you wanted
- 40:53Speaker 1: to get in this game and pick somebody off, it's
- 40:55Speaker 1: gonna cost you more and your risk is gonna go higher.
- 40:57Speaker 1: It's a really good theory. We don't know if it
- 40:59Speaker 1: will work, which is why it's called the pilot program.
- 41:01Speaker 1: The SEC wants to put out, but the industry is
- 41:03Speaker 1: going nuts already because they think it's gonna translate them
- 41:06Speaker 1: to what they call a trade at rule, which would
- 41:08Speaker 1: mean that you can't trade in the dark until you
- 41:09Speaker 1: trade on lid venues first. So they haven't a fit
- 41:12Speaker 1: because it would destroy their business model. But that's not
- 41:14Speaker 1: what the pilot program is calling for it. So, so
- 41:16Speaker 1: if we went to a nickel spread with size on
- 41:19Speaker 1: on bid and ask what would that do the trading costs?
- 41:22Speaker 1: What would that do to to a company like Vanguard
- 41:26Speaker 1: or any of the big mutual funds. How would then
- 41:29Speaker 1: impact they're they're trading right? And this would be only
- 41:32Speaker 1: on small to mid cap. So we proposed the privot
- 41:35Speaker 1: program says five billion market cap and less. We said
- 41:37Speaker 1: that's too high, go to like two billion in less
- 41:40Speaker 1: and and and that's still a couple of thousand stocks
- 41:42Speaker 1: under two billion, none of which really trade. You know,
- 41:46Speaker 1: they trade a few hundred thousand shiars a day. Their orphans.
- 41:49Speaker 1: No one trades them, right, nobody follows them. There's no
- 41:51Speaker 1: Wall Street coverage on them. And you know, last week
- 41:54Speaker 1: we were talking about the small cap um premium and
- 41:58Speaker 1: why small cap stocks have a tendency to outperform big
- 42:01Speaker 1: gap stocks over time, especially if you control for junk,
- 42:05Speaker 1: and that was one of the factors is their orphan stocks.
- 42:08Speaker 1: There's not a lot of liquidly, there's almost no coverage
- 42:12Speaker 1: there certainly isn't big firm coverage. You're not gonna get
- 42:15Speaker 1: Goldman and more Maryland Morgan covering, you know, and even
- 42:19Speaker 1: scrap the small firms. The regional brokers. Remember some of
- 42:22Speaker 1: the names like Robinson, Humphrey McDonald and all of these
- 42:26Speaker 1: names that would be the been eating up by other
- 42:27Speaker 1: brokers have went out of business. They don't have the
- 42:29Speaker 1: economics to support that trading anymore. Those market makers are gone,
- 42:32Speaker 1: they've been replaced by algorithms and so on. So how
- 42:35Speaker 1: do you bring them back? And and the theory and
- 42:37Speaker 1: Jeff Solomon over account and who's the president of account.
- 42:39Speaker 1: He's big on this. That is to how do I
- 42:42Speaker 1: get these market makers back? And you have to put
- 42:44Speaker 1: an economic incentive. You have to add otherwise no one's
- 42:47Speaker 1: gonna do it. And the economic incentive would be a
- 42:49Speaker 1: nicola a dime spread. And that's how. But you also
- 42:52Speaker 1: have to have an obligation come in there and put
- 42:54Speaker 1: some real size in there, not just a hundred chair
- 42:56Speaker 1: that that's been one of the complaints. You see this
- 42:57Speaker 1: penny spread and you go to buy something and you
- 42:59Speaker 1: get forty seven shares, And what's the point I need?
- 43:03Speaker 1: The penny spread is really the liquidity is illusory, the
- 43:07Speaker 1: spread is illusory. A lot of things that look like
- 43:09Speaker 1: one thing really aren't. Although I'm starting to get a sense,
- 43:13Speaker 1: a hint from you that your position has softened over
- 43:17Speaker 1: the past few years, because two or two years ago,
- 43:20Speaker 1: it was like we're all going to heck and this
- 43:22Speaker 1: is a disaster in the market's gonna collapse under its
- 43:25Speaker 1: own weight. To Hey, there have been some incremental improvements
- 43:28Speaker 1: and some market based improvements like I E X that
- 43:31Speaker 1: are actually bringing back some positive things to the market structure.
- 43:37Speaker 1: I would agree with that, and and and I think
- 43:39Speaker 1: it's because of the efforts of a bunch of folks,
- 43:41Speaker 1: and you know, we certainly were one of the first
- 43:43Speaker 1: out of the water. But if this market structure debate
- 43:45Speaker 1: didn't get pushed forward, we wouldn't be talking about improvements
- 43:48Speaker 1: right now. We wouldn't be talking about market market based solutions.
- 43:52Speaker 1: We'd be talking about the same problem. So systemic risks
- 43:55Speaker 1: that you guys have written a lot about, they'd still
- 43:57Speaker 1: be there, right and then they are still there, But
- 43:59Speaker 1: we're moving long in the right through. We're getting exchanges now,
- 44:02Speaker 1: like Jeff Sprecker of the New York Stock Exchange coming
- 44:04Speaker 1: in saying, hey, this make or take a model is ridiculous.
- 44:06Speaker 1: We gotta get rid of it. A couple of years ago,
- 44:09Speaker 1: you know, Duncanita Howard would never would have said that.
- 44:12Speaker 1: So things are different, and in the market structure debate,
- 44:14Speaker 1: it's a sophisticated one. It's moving forward, and this is
- 44:17Speaker 1: what we always wanted. So on a scale of one
- 44:20Speaker 1: to ten, if it was a disaster in two thousand ten,
- 44:23Speaker 1: at zero and ten is the optimal market structure, where
- 44:27Speaker 1: are we today? Four or not even not even halfway there? Wow,
- 44:33Speaker 1: that's uh, that's a really fascinating number. What what other
- 44:37Speaker 1: areas of the markets were you cop stock market wise?
- 44:41Speaker 1: I mean the biggest we have issues with, like I
- 44:44Speaker 1: mentioned before, fragmentation, dark pools. The non exchange off exchange
- 44:49Speaker 1: percentage of volume is close to which means that almost
- 44:53Speaker 1: four out of every ten shares is not traded on
- 44:55Speaker 1: an exchange. So now when we look at really soft volume,
- 44:59Speaker 1: which we've seen since you know, MARCHO nine lows how
- 45:03Speaker 1: much of that is just mom and pop walking away?
- 45:06Speaker 1: How much of it is dark pools? Why has volume
- 45:10Speaker 1: been so low? And what does that mean? Volume is
- 45:12Speaker 1: low right now because volatility is low. But if ilum
- 45:15Speaker 1: has been fairly suppressed for five years, has uh it
- 45:18Speaker 1: well off the peak of it. We wereround ten billion
- 45:20Speaker 1: shares across all exchanges back when the financial crisis was
- 45:23Speaker 1: going on. Now we're closely to six billions. So it's
- 45:26Speaker 1: a big drop. Yeah, because we got really lot of
- 45:28Speaker 1: the noisy. You know, if it volatility is not there,
- 45:31Speaker 1: you can't profit from latency arbitrarge situations. You can't pick
- 45:35Speaker 1: off someone as easily. Where is some of that volume going?
- 45:38Speaker 1: It's going to other markets. The currency market has exploded
- 45:41Speaker 1: with the electronic activity because it's so it's much more volatile,
- 45:45Speaker 1: and it's very liquid, and you know these trillions of
- 45:48Speaker 1: dollars literally, and it's it's not centralized. The they don't
- 45:52Speaker 1: even have at least in the equity world, we have
- 45:53Speaker 1: a linkage that's SIP the security. They haven't only got
- 45:56Speaker 1: a linkage in the in the foreign exchange world. So
- 45:58Speaker 1: it's a lot easier for you to develop your own
- 46:00Speaker 1: quote and to see something better than somebody else. The
- 46:03Speaker 1: banks have their own problems there as well. There's an article,
- 46:06Speaker 1: yes they'm on Bloomberg about the Last Look and things
- 46:09Speaker 1: like that, that there's a lot of issues in the
- 46:10Speaker 1: currency world, which we in the equity world. Actually we're
- 46:13Speaker 1: a lot more advanced when it comes to market structure
- 46:16Speaker 1: than something in the currency. People have talked about the
- 46:18Speaker 1: currency markets and and four x as the broadest, deepest
- 46:22Speaker 1: market with the most sophisticated systems, and you never can
- 46:26Speaker 1: you see a flash crash and concert absolutely, I absolutely
- 46:30Speaker 1: think you can it. Is it inevitable? Is it possible?
- 46:33Speaker 1: Is it likely? I think it's probably likely because with
- 46:35Speaker 1: the with the global event, you know, if if the
- 46:38Speaker 1: Swedish bang on to Swiss, Swiss Bank decides to change
- 46:40Speaker 1: the way they're going to set things which ago and
- 46:44Speaker 1: you did see a rapid moving currencies because you know,
- 46:46Speaker 1: is it really institutional volume, is it real bona FID
- 46:49Speaker 1: hedgers coming in there trading that, No, it's noise. It's
- 46:52Speaker 1: guys who are using I call it noise. But it's
- 46:55Speaker 1: basically a multi asset model. So you're trading stocks, equity,
- 46:58Speaker 1: you're trading stocks, opts, and futures, currencies, bonds. You're putting
- 47:01Speaker 1: it all together into this little magic sausage factory yours,
- 47:06Speaker 1: and you're developing a strategy. So if one all of
- 47:08Speaker 1: a sudden, there's an event in one area, you're gonna
- 47:10Speaker 1: move out. So yeah, it could happen in any one
- 47:13Speaker 1: of those markets. So zero to ten is a four,
- 47:16Speaker 1: So that's a big improvement, but that still means we're
- 47:19Speaker 1: sticks away from ten and and there's a lot of
- 47:21Speaker 1: potential problem. So you had mentioned um currencies, you had
- 47:25Speaker 1: mentioned treasuries. What about commodity markets. Commodity markets a little
- 47:29Speaker 1: different because they operate more in a vertical silo, so
- 47:31Speaker 1: you don't have the multi exchange, multi venue model, and
- 47:35Speaker 1: you have your trading oil, you're trading natures, or you're
- 47:39Speaker 1: you're not. Everything isn't as it's but they use a
- 47:42Speaker 1: huge leverage though they do and they have, but they're
- 47:45Speaker 1: they're a lot more control that they seem to have
- 47:47Speaker 1: their their grips on it better. I don't know, I'm
- 47:48Speaker 1: not certainly not an expert. You know, people used to
- 47:51Speaker 1: talk about commodity markets like it was the wild West
- 47:53Speaker 1: and all the lock limit down and all this crazy
- 47:55Speaker 1: stuff happens, and you're saying, the structure is better than
- 47:59Speaker 1: what we see else. Ironically, the the the flash crash
- 48:02Speaker 1: of two thousand and ten that we spoke about earlier
- 48:04Speaker 1: was stopped because of a piece of software at the CME,
- 48:07Speaker 1: the Chicago Mercantile Exchange called stop logic, which said that
- 48:11Speaker 1: if it got too volatile, halted for five seconds. I
- 48:14Speaker 1: believe it was five seconds. And that's really what the
- 48:16Speaker 1: bottom of the flash five second quote hall. And that
- 48:21Speaker 1: tells you that every asset is linked, because when the
- 48:23Speaker 1: mini stopped trading, everybody said, hold on a second, what's
- 48:26Speaker 1: going on, and that guys like us who are trading stocks,
- 48:28Speaker 1: but guys who have multi asset strategies who were all
- 48:31Speaker 1: electronically linked, then realized, hey, there really isn't something going
- 48:34Speaker 1: on here For people who don't know E Minis or
- 48:36Speaker 1: the SMP futures huge leverage with that you're called minis,
- 48:41Speaker 1: but you're putting up a million dollars and trading like
- 48:44Speaker 1: I don't remember what it is, but it's tens of
- 48:45Speaker 1: millions of dollars of stock. It doesn't take a lot
- 48:48Speaker 1: of money to swing a boatload of stock in those
- 48:51Speaker 1: and it's supposedly the most liquid instrument when it comes
- 48:53Speaker 1: to commodities. Yet that was also the one blamed for
- 48:56Speaker 1: the initiation of the flash crash because they couldn't handle
- 48:59Speaker 1: seventy five housing contracts, which makes you kind of scratch
- 49:01Speaker 1: your head. Why could the most liquid security in the
- 49:03Speaker 1: world not handled. Sure, it's a big order, but it
- 49:05Speaker 1: doesn't the reason that that side put out doesn't hold
- 49:08Speaker 1: water at all. Right, So, first, the first rumor we
- 49:11Speaker 1: heard was it was a fat thumb, which is trade
- 49:14Speaker 1: or talk for somebody accidentally throwing an extra zero on
- 49:17Speaker 1: an order, or or you know, just leaning on a keyboard.
- 49:20Speaker 1: And you know, if you ever leading on a keyboard
- 49:22Speaker 1: and here, just picture that on a trading desk and
- 49:25Speaker 1: what that means when you're shooting you know, millions of
- 49:28Speaker 1: orders all at once. It it's hey, fat thumb, that's
- 49:30Speaker 1: really a problem. I'll tell you one of the problem
- 49:33Speaker 1: that they have right now, they don't have the surveillance
- 49:36Speaker 1: they SEC in particular, does not have a surveillance system
- 49:39Speaker 1: to keep up with today's modern markets, today's micro second trading,
- 49:44Speaker 1: you know, and a million of a second. These guys
- 49:46Speaker 1: are doing things that we can't. There's a world underneath it, right.
- 49:49Speaker 1: The SEC doesn't have a system tomorrow. They actually had
- 49:52Speaker 1: to sub out to an h f T guy to
- 49:55Speaker 1: build a system called Midas that COSTOM two and a
- 49:57Speaker 1: half million a year, which is barely a bunch of
- 49:59Speaker 1: direct fee being aggregated. How can nanex do this? And
- 50:03Speaker 1: if you haven't seen the beautiful artwork that how do
- 50:07Speaker 1: I pronounce his last name, Eric hunt Setter's work on
- 50:11Speaker 1: nanax dot net? Is that right? Uh? He creates these
- 50:15Speaker 1: beautiful mosaic showing all these quotes and trades and their
- 50:21Speaker 1: artwork their fantastic all they are visual representation of actual trades.
- 50:26Speaker 1: How can he do it? But the SEC can't. It's incredible.
- 50:29Speaker 1: He could have built and I've spoken to Erica and
- 50:32Speaker 1: we speak to him often but he could have built
- 50:33Speaker 1: Midas for a lot cheaper than they spent on it. Okay,
- 50:36Speaker 1: he runs it. He basically takes in the feeds and
- 50:38Speaker 1: he analyzes this stuff. But the problem with the secs
- 50:41Speaker 1: and and the problem with our regulatory system is we've
- 50:43Speaker 1: got futures on one side, which is the CFCC, We've
- 50:47Speaker 1: got the SEC we're doing equities and options. They're not
- 50:49Speaker 1: aggregating everything, and in some counts over their treasuries. Over here,
- 50:53Speaker 1: it's really very much fragment. And if if you're if
- 50:56Speaker 1: you're spoofing in the currency market to affect something in
- 50:59Speaker 1: the bond market, you're never gonna be caught. Is that
- 51:01Speaker 1: going on today? I don't know, because we don't have
- 51:04Speaker 1: the surveillance systems to watch it, but theoretically that I
- 51:06Speaker 1: would think so absolutely. So let me ask you a
- 51:08Speaker 1: hypothetical question. One of the guys. So, whenever we do
- 51:11Speaker 1: these these conversations, my office is always so, who are
- 51:14Speaker 1: we speaking with this week? And I always tell them so,
- 51:17Speaker 1: and I get some fascinating questions from from some of
- 51:20Speaker 1: the staff members. And my head of research said, Hey,
- 51:23Speaker 1: do me a favor. Ask Joe, what would happen if
- 51:26Speaker 1: tonight every h f T firm was shut down, what
- 51:30Speaker 1: would happen to markets going forward? Much rejoicing, No, I'm
- 51:33Speaker 1: just I'm just no. If they shut down, sure, you're
- 51:38Speaker 1: gonna widen spreads, right naturally, If if the bigils in
- 51:41Speaker 1: that gap, who will replaces them? It's a good question.
- 51:44Speaker 1: Do market forces that overnight? It's not gonna happen, right,
- 51:47Speaker 1: But eventually, Let's take for instance, that tick size pilot
- 51:50Speaker 1: we were talking about. If the h f T s
- 51:52Speaker 1: don't want to play in the stocks because of a
- 51:54Speaker 1: nickel spread, there will be someone coming along. The vacuum
- 51:58Speaker 1: will be there's money to be made, there's it to
- 52:00Speaker 1: be made. Real traditional market makers will come back, Real
- 52:02Speaker 1: liquidity will come back. Maybe the spread is a little
- 52:05Speaker 1: bit wider, but we would argue that to spread is
- 52:07Speaker 1: really today's market. Like you was saying before, if I
- 52:11Speaker 1: want to buy five thousand shares, how do I get
- 52:13Speaker 1: five And if I can do it with a nickel spread,
- 52:15Speaker 1: that's actually a better thing, right the hundred fifty to forty.
- 52:19Speaker 1: By the time you feel thousand shares your fifteen cents away,
- 52:23Speaker 1: that's right. And we've heard all sorts of stories about
- 52:25Speaker 1: about those sort of sweeps and that penny spread is
- 52:28Speaker 1: nonsense now it is, it isn't. And that's where you
- 52:30Speaker 1: get picked off by the way that people will see
- 52:32Speaker 1: you coming. And that's where brad over they move out
- 52:34Speaker 1: of the way. They will, they'll disappear if you're coming
- 52:37Speaker 1: through a slower router, and the next thing you know,
- 52:39Speaker 1: they'll take the stock in front of you, and you
- 52:40Speaker 1: have now paying a nickel higher and you've got two
- 52:43Speaker 1: eighty seven shares, Like, what the heck are you doing?
- 52:45Speaker 1: That's we have to be when you're trading now, especially
- 52:46Speaker 1: with larger pieces, you better be sophisticated. You better know
- 52:49Speaker 1: how the routes work. You better know what's going into
- 52:51Speaker 1: every route, what type of order is going out. We
- 52:54Speaker 1: didn't even get into these crazy order types. But you
- 52:56Speaker 1: need to know the plumbing right or or like if
- 52:59Speaker 1: you ran a race car, if you're a race car drive,
- 53:01Speaker 1: you want to know what's in that engine. You better
- 53:03Speaker 1: know the inside of this engine. If you're trading size
- 53:05Speaker 1: right now, you will get picked off. And then unfortunately,
- 53:08Speaker 1: at the end of the day, you may think you
- 53:10Speaker 1: got what they call a v WAPP or volume weighted
- 53:13Speaker 1: average price, that that's gonna be across all these different
- 53:17Speaker 1: bids and offers where you actually paid you match the
- 53:20Speaker 1: daily v So everybody. There's a lot of managers that
- 53:22Speaker 1: will try to benchmark the v WAP and they'll say,
- 53:25Speaker 1: if I got as good as the VWAP, I did
- 53:26Speaker 1: a good job today. And we would argue that you're
- 53:28Speaker 1: not over paying through the trades correct, correct, because you're
- 53:31Speaker 1: doing an average job, because that's the average price. And
- 53:34Speaker 1: we would argue that if you're not sophisticated with your routes,
- 53:37Speaker 1: you're actually causing that VWAP to be higher than where
- 53:40Speaker 1: it should if you're a buyer, or a lower if
- 53:42Speaker 1: you're a seller, because you're not really paying attention to
- 53:44Speaker 1: the intricacies of why did that hundred shairs go up
- 53:47Speaker 1: on the bat's inverted exchange, Why did it go up
- 53:49Speaker 1: in a dark pool? Why is that route going here
- 53:51Speaker 1: constantly in the same low rebate venue or high rebate venue.
- 53:55Speaker 1: These are the questions that we ask all day long
- 53:58Speaker 1: why our trading is different than others out there. But
- 54:00Speaker 1: once you learn the inside of it, then you'll be
- 54:02Speaker 1: armed a little bit better. It's still gonna be tough.
- 54:04Speaker 1: It's not easy, So you've been doing this for twenty
- 54:08Speaker 1: plus years. I remember when I began around that same
- 54:11Speaker 1: time as a trader and as if I'm a if
- 54:14Speaker 1: I'm a seller, and suddenly Goldman shows up on the
- 54:16Speaker 1: top of you know, it was mostly NASDAX stocks on
- 54:19Speaker 1: the top of the box as the bidder for size.
- 54:22Speaker 1: I would get out of the way. But I wasn't
- 54:24Speaker 1: a market maker. I was just executing orders um either
- 54:27Speaker 1: for proprietary trades or on behalf of clients. This is
- 54:32Speaker 1: really very, very different than those days. That's almost simple
- 54:36Speaker 1: and quaint compared to the complications you're described today. It's
- 54:40Speaker 1: it's you know, that was like the axe. They used
- 54:42Speaker 1: to call it, right, that's right, and the ax came
- 54:44Speaker 1: in everybody, and you knew in different stocks it was
- 54:46Speaker 1: different different how you know, there were certain there was
- 54:49Speaker 1: certain stocks that when bear Sterns showed up, hey, everybody
- 54:52Speaker 1: out of the pool. They were starting to suck up
- 54:54Speaker 1: a million shares or certain hedge funds, let's just call it.
- 54:57Speaker 1: That everyone knew was quote unquote March smart money. They
- 55:00Speaker 1: started ripping through his stock, but that was you know,
- 55:02Speaker 1: his intelligence. Sure there was issues back then of of
- 55:05Speaker 1: transparency as well. But the market now is so much different,
- 55:08Speaker 1: and when you think about it. Scott Patterson, the Wall
- 55:10Speaker 1: Street Journal reporter, wrote a book called Dark Pools, which
- 55:13Speaker 1: I think is tremendous, by the way, and I love now.
- 55:16Speaker 1: He also wrote The Quants Fantastic, which is one of
- 55:19Speaker 1: my favorite books describing what's taking place over the past
- 55:22Speaker 1: ten years. But dark Pools is almost like The Quants
- 55:25Speaker 1: Part two. It's very sophisticated, it's very fascinating. And he
- 55:30Speaker 1: goes through the the kind of the the lineage of
- 55:32Speaker 1: what HFC, where they came from, and he goes back
- 55:35Speaker 1: to this firm called Island. It was J C. And
- 55:37Speaker 1: and when we were at instant that that was one
- 55:39Speaker 1: of our competitors. They were this small kind of firm,
- 55:41Speaker 1: but a lot of the guys who were at Island
- 55:43Speaker 1: kind of morphed out and they went to these h
- 55:44Speaker 1: F T firms along the way. And it's almost the
- 55:47Speaker 1: Island came out first and came up with this i'll
- 55:49Speaker 1: pay you to add liquidity theory. It was their original
- 55:52Speaker 1: thing that said I'll pay you to add liquidity, and
- 55:54Speaker 1: now it's in every major stock exchange around the world.
- 55:56Speaker 1: That was their competitive advantage. That's how they attracted all
- 55:59Speaker 1: this volu The other thing about the book Dark Pools
- 56:03Speaker 1: was I think I may be confusing this. I think
- 56:06Speaker 1: that's where I first learned that Renaissance Technologies one of
- 56:10Speaker 1: the most successful hedge funds of all time a year
- 56:14Speaker 1: for thirty years. So successful they said to their outside clients, Hey, here,
- 56:19Speaker 1: thanks for your money, but we're just gonna invest our
- 56:21Speaker 1: own money. That's how you know it's not a nonsense return.
- 56:26Speaker 1: We'll we'll, we'll take it from here. Um that they
- 56:29Speaker 1: were one of the earliest high frequency traders and had
- 56:32Speaker 1: before anyone in Wall Street even had a clue what
- 56:34Speaker 1: they were doing. That needs to talk it. These guys
- 56:36Speaker 1: had come up with a series of just ingenious ways,
- 56:41Speaker 1: long long before everybody else had figured this out. And
- 56:43Speaker 1: that's when it was easy pickings for them, right, it
- 56:45Speaker 1: was easy to shoot, have a latency, our situation going on,
- 56:48Speaker 1: and no one even knew what the heck it was.
- 56:49Speaker 1: And now I mean to the lots of competition much harder.
- 56:53Speaker 1: It's changed, and so we increase their cost so so
- 56:56Speaker 1: they're not as profitable, No one's Jim Simmons retired, they're
- 57:00Speaker 1: not as profitable, and I keep although they're still wildly successful,
- 57:04Speaker 1: and I continue to read that h f T firms
- 57:07Speaker 1: are just becoming less and less profitable, less competition and
- 57:12Speaker 1: and a handful of big guys are now dominating the volumes.
- 57:17Speaker 1: And whether that's Virtue or Get Go or a handful
- 57:21Speaker 1: of other companies um which are also which you don't
- 57:24Speaker 1: go into details of names and in broken markets, but
- 57:28Speaker 1: Flashboys does so. So is this just naturally on the
- 57:33Speaker 1: wane or what's going on? It's the term they call
- 57:36Speaker 1: the race to zero. This is by far the race
- 57:39Speaker 1: they're trying to zero out that that latency has gotten
- 57:41Speaker 1: so squeezed. But here's the problem for an h f T.
- 57:44Speaker 1: If I'm an h f T and you're an h
- 57:46Speaker 1: f T and you decide to build a new microwave network,
- 57:48Speaker 1: that's gonna get you one micro second fast or some
- 57:52Speaker 1: data and the thousandths of a second million, a million, millions,
- 57:55Speaker 1: a million, and whatever it may be. I'm just throwing
- 57:58Speaker 1: numbers out there. But you're gonna be faster because you're
- 57:59Speaker 1: gonn to spend ten million dollars, say, building a microwave
- 58:03Speaker 1: between here in Chicago over the is gone microwave. It's
- 58:08Speaker 1: now over the lasers, whatever else to exact. But if
- 58:11Speaker 1: you do it, I have no choice but to do
- 58:13Speaker 1: it if I want to remain competitive to you, which
- 58:15Speaker 1: means now it's gonna cause me ten million, which means
- 58:18Speaker 1: that's gonna be sucked right out of my profits. That's
- 58:20Speaker 1: why you see in the margin start to collapse. So eventually,
- 58:22Speaker 1: I think what will happen is the smaller ones are
- 58:24Speaker 1: going to drift off. They will not be able to compete.
- 58:26Speaker 1: The bigger ones will get bigger, which does become an
- 58:29Speaker 1: issue of how much power they have. And but that's
- 58:31Speaker 1: where you're going to have to have some regulations coming
- 58:33Speaker 1: and say, okay, let's get some obligations on these guys
- 58:35Speaker 1: as well. They're not going away, They're so h f
- 58:38Speaker 1: T is here to stay. We're not. We're not going
- 58:40Speaker 1: to see them disappear. But it's morphing. In other words,
- 58:43Speaker 1: it's becoming something different. I guess they're trying to legitimatize themselves, right.
- 58:47Speaker 1: It's it's like, well, is that is that gonna happen?
- 58:49Speaker 1: Are they going to become obligated legitimized players or they
- 58:53Speaker 1: still just snipers picking off you know, millipennies will be different.
- 58:57Speaker 1: There are different ones. There's you know, h F T
- 58:59Speaker 1: is different and it's really hard to bucket. And we've
- 59:01Speaker 1: learned we were not the smartest when we first started
- 59:04Speaker 1: doing this, and we've learned a lot a lot over
- 59:06Speaker 1: the years, and we've learned that you can't just bucket
- 59:09Speaker 1: HFC into one bucket. They are different types of players, right,
- 59:12Speaker 1: and they do different things. But the smaller players who
- 59:15Speaker 1: are there to pick off and just kind of kind
- 59:17Speaker 1: of sniff out a little of what we call venue arbitrage,
- 59:20Speaker 1: trying to pick you off because one venue slower it
- 59:21Speaker 1: in the other that business is going away. They they're
- 59:24Speaker 1: squeezing that out, that that that latency are that used
- 59:26Speaker 1: to see when you trade bats versus nasadac or a
- 59:29Speaker 1: dark pool, and the dark pools are now being more
- 59:31Speaker 1: you know, investigated more like two attorney in general, that's changing.
- 59:34Speaker 1: But market making, if you call it market making, you know,
- 59:37Speaker 1: we call something different like you know, specialists and so on.
- 59:39Speaker 1: But if they're market making a stock versus an e
- 59:41Speaker 1: t F or an e t F versus the future,
- 59:44Speaker 1: and they would still want to do that and they
- 59:45Speaker 1: think they're profitable. Congratulations, good luck, but let's play by
- 59:50Speaker 1: the same rules. That's amazing. I can remember as a
- 59:53Speaker 1: trader being able to visually see different prices, or throwing
- 59:58Speaker 1: out a quote an eighth below the bid, suddenly seeing
- 1:00:02Speaker 1: I'm filled, and immediately selling it to somebody else an
- 1:00:05Speaker 1: eighth higher. The markets were at least on an eighth level,
- 1:00:09Speaker 1: so inefficient. And I'm talking the nineties, we're not talking
- 1:00:12Speaker 1: post two thousand, um. But you could literally do that
- 1:00:16Speaker 1: if you were quick on the keyboard and you had
- 1:00:18Speaker 1: a couple of little macro set up. But you didn't
- 1:00:21Speaker 1: even know it. If you call that high frequency trading,
- 1:00:25Speaker 1: it's it's a human manual. Uh, just a quickly picking
- 1:00:30Speaker 1: off an eighth on a thousand shares. Not exactly high Fenci.
- 1:00:34Speaker 1: By the way, whenever you whenever you did that, it
- 1:00:36Speaker 1: was it was just a rare. It was on a slow,
- 1:00:39Speaker 1: boring day and you had nothing to do, and let's
- 1:00:41Speaker 1: throw a few quotes out and see what happens. Suddenly
- 1:00:44Speaker 1: you find yourself filled and you're you know, at worst
- 1:00:47Speaker 1: you're out for a break even or an eighth loss.
- 1:00:49Speaker 1: But it was just one of those things that and
- 1:00:51Speaker 1: you always wondered, why can't you do this automatically. Why
- 1:00:54Speaker 1: wasn't there technology for it? Never in a million years
- 1:00:57Speaker 1: imagining it would be like it, it's got and it's
- 1:01:00Speaker 1: gotten today. Yeah, and there is a have and have
- 1:01:03Speaker 1: not in the world of trading now. The halves are
- 1:01:06Speaker 1: the ones who can pay enough money to buy that
- 1:01:09Speaker 1: co location facility, to rent the co location facility, to
- 1:01:12Speaker 1: purchase the data feeds, to set up a microwave network,
- 1:01:15Speaker 1: to do all the things they do right, So you
- 1:01:17Speaker 1: have created a tiered process. And in the in the
- 1:01:20Speaker 1: trading world, there's no doubt about it, there are those
- 1:01:22Speaker 1: that do and those that don't. So you know, you're
- 1:01:24Speaker 1: really not competing on the same level playing for it
- 1:01:26Speaker 1: when it comes to technology. But look, I'm not going
- 1:01:28Speaker 1: to argue against certain things, but i am going to
- 1:01:30Speaker 1: argue when there's a dark pool out there and he's
- 1:01:32Speaker 1: advantaging one client because that client is you know, an
- 1:01:36Speaker 1: h F T and he's gonna say, I'm gonna give
- 1:01:37Speaker 1: you a special look or something like that. Here we
- 1:01:40Speaker 1: have a lot of issues. Or you know, couple aren't
- 1:01:42Speaker 1: exchanges doing something similar by selling that data they are
- 1:01:46Speaker 1: and data feeds what they called the proprietary data feeds
- 1:01:48Speaker 1: we think should absolutely be looked at by the SEC
- 1:01:51Speaker 1: should be why they have you. Here's what the exchange
- 1:01:55Speaker 1: will say, Hey, Barry, you want to buy a data feed,
- 1:01:57Speaker 1: I love to sell you one, buddy, ten thousand a month.
- 1:02:00Speaker 1: Here you go purchase and anyway anybody can buy. They're
- 1:02:02Speaker 1: going to turn around. But realistically a month doesn't mean
- 1:02:06Speaker 1: that if I'm not buying a hundred chairs I'm gonna need.
- 1:02:08Speaker 1: It doesn't help you. It doesn't help you. And then
- 1:02:10Speaker 1: you also got to build the entire infrastructures to make
- 1:02:12Speaker 1: that data. The data feeds just a fuel that runs
- 1:02:14Speaker 1: the engine. You gotta still build the engine. Okay, But
- 1:02:17Speaker 1: what they're giving in these data feeds is not just
- 1:02:19Speaker 1: there's a lot of information and a lot of content.
- 1:02:21Speaker 1: In fact, a couple of years ago we actually wrote
- 1:02:23Speaker 1: a white paper where we talked two of the major
- 1:02:25Speaker 1: exchanges giving out information on what it was supposedly a
- 1:02:28Speaker 1: hidden order flow, so an institution could put in fifty
- 1:02:31Speaker 1: shares hidden I don't want anybody seeing it. But they
- 1:02:33Speaker 1: were putting tags on this flow, which basically allowed others
- 1:02:37Speaker 1: to re engineer it. People who bought the data feeds
- 1:02:39Speaker 1: and figured out that there was a buyer there. So
- 1:02:41Speaker 1: let me ask you a question. Knowing the exchanges for
- 1:02:44Speaker 1: profit are willing to do that, why would anybody trust
- 1:02:47Speaker 1: anything they say? Aren't these just shameless salespeople who are
- 1:02:52Speaker 1: basically going to say, I will sell this client down
- 1:02:55Speaker 1: the road to that client because I can. Is that
- 1:02:57Speaker 1: what actually took place? It their penalties where they're fine,
- 1:03:03Speaker 1: the SEC didn't even look into. But the exchanges after
- 1:03:05Speaker 1: they call grief from the institutional community, changed it voluntarily,
- 1:03:09Speaker 1: just like the direct Edge exchange a couple of years
- 1:03:11Speaker 1: back with doing flash orders where they were showing orders
- 1:03:14Speaker 1: to a certain subset of clients for half a second,
- 1:03:17Speaker 1: which is an eternity, and they were half a second,
- 1:03:20Speaker 1: would you like to buy us? No? Okay, you go
- 1:03:21Speaker 1: out in front and front of yourself. It was ridiculous.
- 1:03:24Speaker 1: But but but but here's what they'll in their defense.
- 1:03:26Speaker 1: They're gonna say, well, wait a second, show everything we
- 1:03:28Speaker 1: do with public everything that we do has to be
- 1:03:30Speaker 1: filed with the SEC after the fact three months later
- 1:03:33Speaker 1: in forty pages of six point legal ease. But buddy,
- 1:03:36Speaker 1: it's approved by the SEC. Why would they ever allow
- 1:03:40Speaker 1: certain order types to be approved? Who is that the SEC?
- 1:03:44Speaker 1: Looking at the exchange documents saying, yeah, that looks like
- 1:03:46Speaker 1: it's fair to everyone. It's insane. So here's why we
- 1:03:48Speaker 1: call it a broken market. Because you've got regulators who
- 1:03:51Speaker 1: are allowing this, exchanges who are for profit h f
- 1:03:53Speaker 1: t s who take advantage of it, and in between
- 1:03:55Speaker 1: is the retail and institutional guy going what the hell
- 1:03:58Speaker 1: is going on? That? That's unbelieva. I'm gonna end this
- 1:04:01Speaker 1: segment with um a quote from my colleague Josh Brown,
- 1:04:06Speaker 1: who said, and I love this quote, the best way
- 1:04:08Speaker 1: to defeat high frequency trading is with low frequency trading.
- 1:04:13Speaker 1: Meaning if if you're not in there, if you're not
- 1:04:15Speaker 1: in there as a retail investor, if you're not in
- 1:04:18Speaker 1: there trying to compete with these guys, you're not gonna
- 1:04:20Speaker 1: lose them. That that's that's exactly right. Well, well, this
- 1:04:24Speaker 1: has been really a ton of fun. Thank you so much. Joe, Say,
- 1:04:27Speaker 1: how do your partner salve for us? We've been speaking
- 1:04:30Speaker 1: with Joe. I was gonna say, Joe Arnock, we've been
- 1:04:33Speaker 1: speaking with Joe so Lousy, author of Broken Markets and
- 1:04:38Speaker 1: partner with Sal Arnuck of Famous Trading. If you enjoy
- 1:04:42Speaker 1: this conversation, be sure to look up or down an
- 1:04:45Speaker 1: inch or two on iTunes or on bloomberg View dot
- 1:04:49Speaker 1: com or on Bloomberg dot com to see the rest
- 1:04:52Speaker 1: of our podcasts. I'm Barry Ridults. You've been listening to
- 1:04:55Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. You're listening to Master's
- 1:05:00Speaker 1: in Business with Barry Redholts on Bloomberg Radio.