Al Gore's Chakra Slows Down Market Trading

[4est_4est_Gump]

Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4 percent of all quote traffic in the U.S. stock market last week, according to the top tracker of high-frequency trading activity. The motive of the algorithm is still unclear.

The program placed orders in 25-millisecond bursts involving about 500 stocks, according to Nanex, a market data firm. The algorithm never executed a single trade, and it abruptly ended at about 10:30 a.m. Friday.

“Just goes to show you how just one person can have such an outsized impact on the market,” said Eric Hunsader, head of Nanex and the No. 1 detector of trading anomalies watching Wall Street today. “Exchanges are just not monitoring it.”

...

“My guess is that the algo was testing the market, as high-frequency frequently does,” says Jon Najarian, co-founder of TradeMonster.com. “As soon as they add bandwidth, the HFT crowd sees how quickly they can top out to create latency.”

Translation: the ultimate goal of many of these programs is to gum up the system so it slows down the quote feed to others and allows the computer traders (with their co-located servers at the exchanges) to gain a money-making arbitrage opportunity.

...

Hunsader warned that regulators better do something fast, speculating that this single program could have led to something very bad if big news broke or a sell-off occurred and one entity was hogging this much of the system.

 

[tactful]

Dude was bias against nanoseconds, damn him.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

He asked them for the ol' in-out...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

No time, I'm here to read the metre . . . .

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The gathering of my droogs!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

We seem to have found Dim in the other thread . . . .

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You got that right!
Sho got that Wright...