Financial topics

[aedens]

When predators have exhausted the economy they will turn on each other.
The result is financial cannibalism. The smart are moving, the smarter already did.

[Higgenbotham]

A lively argument ensued, with the younger SEC staffers taking the side of high-frequency trading and the older half taking Brad’s point. “There was no clear consensus,” said Brad. “But it gave me a sense that they weren’t going to be doing anything anytime soon.”‡ After the meeting, RBC conducted a study, never released publicly, in which they found that more than two hundred SEC staffers since 2007 had left their government jobs to work for high-frequency trading firms or the firms that lobbied Washington on their behalf. Some of these people had played central roles in deciding how, or even whether, to regulate high-frequency trading. For instance, in June 2010, the associate director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets, Elizabeth King, had quit the SEC to work for Getco. The SEC, like the public stock exchanges, had a kind of equity stake in the future revenues of high-frequency traders.

http://www.e-reading.ws/txt.php/1027020 ... Revolt.txt

[Higgenbotham]

By the fall of 2011 Schwall had become something like a connoisseur of the uses of LinkedIn to find stuff out about people in and around high-frequency trading. He’d put a face on high-frequency trading, or rather two faces. “I began to anticipate that certain people were in on the game,” said Schwall. “I’d connect to them so that I could see their network. There were maybe twenty-five guys I called kingpins—the people who actually knew what was going on.” At the very top of the food chain were a lot of white guys in their forties whose careers could be traced back, one way or another, to the early electronic stock exchanges born of the regulations passed after the crash of 1987—Wall Street guys who might have some technical background but whose identity was more trader than programming geek.

Generation X.

http://www.e-reading.ws/txt.php/1027020 ... Revolt.txt

[aedens]

Don’t force anything for a few weeks. Few stocks are holding this up.

[Higgenbotham]

He understood that Goldman’s quants were forever dreaming up new trading strategies, in the form of algorithms, for his robots to execute, and that these traders were meant to be extremely shrewd. He grasped further that “all their algorithms are premised on some sort of prediction—predicting something one second into the future.” But you needed only to observe the 2008 stock market crash from inside of Goldman Sachs, as Serge had, to see that what seemed predictable often was not. Day after volatile day in September 2008, Goldman’s supposedly brilliant traders were losing tens of millions of dollars. “All of the expectations didn’t work,” recalls Serge. “They thought they controlled the market, but it was an illusion."

Goldman hunted in the same jungle as the small HFT firms, but it could never be as quick or as nimble as those firms: No big Wall Street bank could. The only advantage a big bank enjoyed was its special relationship to the prey: its customers. (As the head of one high-frequency trading firm put it, “When one of these people from the banks interviews with us for a job, he always talks about how smart his algos are, but sooner or later he’ll tell you that without his customer he can’t make any money.”)

http://www.e-reading.ws/txt.php/1027020 ... Revolt.txt

[aedens]

alice look inside

A cached page, erased on February 16, just three days before Santelli’s rant, shows that the Alliance also wanted to cover up its ties to the Koch family. The missing link was an announcement that students interested in applying for internships to the Sam Adams Alliance could also apply through the “Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program” through the Institute for Humane Studies, a Koch-funded rightwing institute designed to scout and nurture future leaders of corporate libertarian ideology. The top two board directors at the Sam Adams Alliance include two figures with deep ties to Koch-funded programs: Eric O’Keefe, who previously served in Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies and the Club For Growth; and Joseph Lehman, a former communications VP at Koch’s Cato Institute.

[Higgenbotham]

Don couldn’t speak for NYSE, but he had watched Nasdaq respond by giving HFT firms what they asked for—and then figuring out how to charge them for it. “It was almost like you couldn’t do anything about it,” he said. “We did all this speed, and I don’t think we fully understood what it was being used for. We just thought, The new rules caused people to have a new experience and then new wants and needs.” Nasdaq had become a public company in 2005, a year after Don had joined it. It had earnings targets to hit; it was incentivized to make decisions, and to make changes in the nature of the exchange, with a focus on their short-term consequences. “It’s hard to be forward-thinking when the whole of corporate America is about the next quarter’s earnings,” said Don. “It went from ‘Is this good for the market?’ to ‘Is this bad for the market?’ And then it slides to: ‘Can we get this through the SEC?’ The demon in this part of the story is expediency.” By late 2011, when Bollerman quit his job (“I felt there was a lack of leadership”), more than two-thirds of Nasdaq’s revenues derived, one way or another, from high-frequency trading firms.

Don wasn’t shocked or even all that disturbed by what had happened, or, if he was, he disguised his feelings. The facts of Wall Street life were inherently brutal, in his view. There was nothing that he couldn’t imagine someone on Wall Street doing. He was fully aware that the high-frequency traders were preying on investors, and that the exchanges and brokers were being paid to help them to do it.

http://www.e-reading.ws/txt.php/1027020 ... Revolt.txt

[Higgenbotham]

Brad had heard many firsthand accounts about the nature of that ecosystem. One came from a man named Chris Nagy, who, until 2012, had been responsible for selling the order flow for TD Ameritrade. Every year, people from banks and high-frequency trading firms would fly to Omaha, where TD Ameritrade was based, and negotiate with Nagy. “Most of the deals tend to be handshake deals,” Nagy said. “You go out to a steak dinner. ‘We’ll pay you two cents a share. Everything is good.’ ” The negotiations were always done face-to-face, because no one involved wanted to leave a paper trail. “The payment for the order flow is as off-the-record as possible,” said Nagy. “They never have an email or even a phone call. You had to fly down to meet with us.” For its part, TD Ameritrade was required to publish how much per share they were making from the practice but not the total amounts, which were buried on its income statements on a line labeled “Other Revenue.” “So you can see the income, but you can’t see the deals.”

In his years selling order flow, Nagy noticed a couple of things—and he related them both to Brad and his team when he came to visit them to find out why he kept hearing about this strange new thing called IEX. The first was that the market complexity created by Reg NMS—the rapid growth in the number of stock markets, and in high-frequency trading—raised the value of a stock market customer’s order. “It caused the value of our flow to triple, a least,” Nagy said. The other thing he couldn’t help but notice was that not all of the online brokers appreciated the value of what they were selling. TD Ameritrade was able to sell the right to execute its customers’ orders to high-frequency trading firms for hundreds of millions a year. The bigger Charles Schwab, whose order flow was even more valuable than TD Ameritrade’s, had sold its flow to UBS back in 2005, in an eight-year deal, for only $285 million. (UBS charged the high-frequency trading firm Citadel some undisclosed sum to execute Schwab’s trades.) “Schwab left at least a billion dollars on the table,” Nagy said.

http://www.e-reading.ws/txt.php/1027020 ... Revolt.txt

[aedens]

http://9-11themotherofallblackoperation ... s-how.html

*See: Eustace Mullins' Expose On The FBI COINTELPRO Directed At His Person And His Family, Entitled: "A Writ For Martyrs"

Moreover, unlike Mullins, Nomi Prins never establishes the genesis of the United States' economic problems.

And if Ms. Prins ever decides to do so, she can kiss her ritzy lifestyle goodbye, since she would be neutralized with the type of abject aggression that Eustace Mullins was targeted for by the FBI throughout his entire career.

Prins herself, would become the subject of a smear campaign, and in all likelihood, the vigilante hate crime of organized stalking, which has now, like the cancer it is, become a part of every community in the United States.

Instead, Prins discusses how corporate backed lobbyists are controlling U.S. politicians for their own corrupt agenda, while the American middle class is left footing the bill. She clearly blames most of America's problems on corporatism, without ever getting to the corrupted entity which controls these corporations.

Whats your baud rate https://dillsnapcogitation.wordpress.co ... iring-rnm/

[Higgenbotham]

Moreover, while Ms. Prins is now allowed to make a very nice living demonizing Goldman Sachs and the Zionist Jews on Wall Street, her books never really get to the bottom of who controls Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve System, and the rest of the Communist-run counterfeiting/laundering cartel in the United States.

http://9-11themotherofallblackoperation ... s-how.html

Nobody controls Wall Street or Goldman Sachs except for the people in the offical chain of command of Wall Street and Goldman Sachs. The people who semi-control this country and the world do it in plain view. They are listed on the Forbes 400, they attend their CFR, Bilderberger and Davos meetings, they own the media, they own the politicians, and they tell the Federal Reserve how much money they need printed and when. The reason I say "semi-control" is because this thing is like a machine where there is really no one person or group in complete control of it because it has spun out of control. Obviously some have much more control than others, but like I said about Bill Gates, do you want to be that guy when they system collapses; I don't. It's a hard wired human tendency to want to believe that some deity, some shadowy figures, or somebody in an official leadership capacity can really control events. It's comforting to think somebody is in control of this mess and to think maybe somebody who is more agreeable can be in control of it in the future. Nobody is really in control in the big picture. There is no "Head Dinosaur" here as much as people would like to think. The Rothschilds have got nothing to do with anything. They are mostly dead and gone.