September 13, 2015

Ex-NYSE Chief Admits "It's Not A Fair Market... It's Bad For The Country"

When a digital dickweed exposes the reality "the equity markets are broken," it can be shrugged off as the rantings of a kid in his mom's basement. When an experienced investigative writer claims "the markets are rigged," it is drowned out with mainstream media propaganda forcing words like liquidity and cost-effective-ness to hide the truth. But when Dick Grasso, the former head of the NYSE says Black Monday's flash-crash exposes the reality that "it's not a fair market," it is going to be hard to regain the collapsed confidence of an investor-class multiple-times-burned by an ever more arrogant group of 'operators' on Wall Street.

Here is what we have been saying for years (and most recently here)...
If HFTs did anything, it was merely to frontrun the buy orders once the selling wave - halted thanks to limit downs being hit - had exhausted itself, and the buying scramble was unleashed around 9:35am leading to a 5% move in less than 10 minutes! It was here that Virtu made its colossal profits, however not from taking the least amount of risk, but merely from frontrunning order flow into a stil chaotic market with gargantuan bid-ask spreads, which incidentally not only does not provide liquidity, but reduces it as it competes with other buy offers for any market offers, also known as "providers" of liquidity, only to immediately flip the transaction to those buyers which Virtu knew with 100% certainty were just behind it. In any other market this would be illegal, except for one in which Reg NMS has made such frontrunning perfectly legal (courtesy of billions spent by the same HFTs who now benefit from it).
Read full story at http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-12/ex-nyse-chief-admits-its-not-fair-market-its-bad-country

No comments:

Post a Comment

Share this...