Hear hear.

I pulled out 100K out of the markets because I can't just put up with HFT anymore. So Buy and Hold was a bad idea. Now investing is a bad idea.

You can't put in a stop-loss order anymore on anything you own because every day you have to worry if a mini-flash crash hit one of your issues and triggered it, then the SX won't unwind YOUR trade but they are glad to unwind the fuck-up trades the HFT guys caused.

Actually there WERE enough orders to satisfy the selling, the problem was that the order volume was mostly HFTs that were trading with each other in S&P e-minis. The algorithm was judging the liquidity of the market based on VOLUME, not based off absorption of the securities.

Absorption is when some buyers enter the market, buy stuff, then walk away and sell it at a much later time while everyone else in the market has moved on. They may come back a few hours later to re-sell now that the price has gone higher, but they're not recycling the same securities and getting them handed back to them on the very next trade.

Look at it this way from a programming point of view. You have 2 threads that are sitting on the side, and juggling the same balls between each other. The balls are worth $1,000 each and there are 100 of them being juggled.

So as the stupid hedge fund manager, you insert an order to sell off 5,000 balls at $999 a piece. The order fills for $950 and the two threads pick up the extra 5,000 balls. And now they are trading 5,100 balls between each other, and the price now stabilizes between $950 and $960 per ball. The new balls being passed around have less value because there's more of them in the market so there is dilution, but there is trading volume---which PORTENDS a normal investor to think there is liquidity, but there isn't---because there is no absorption and there's no sideline money... it's an empty market with a few players doing a massive amount of volume.

So take the same situation but now the stupid hedge fund manager starts POURING balls into the 2 threads. Now they are overloaded with volume and trading activity is higher, but there's no sideline money and the number of threads hasn't changed, so now the market has gone beyond saturated. The price per ball plummets.

The balls are linked to other objects which have value, and these start going down (we're talking futures contracts now). Because the OUTSIDE market is already heavily down, the futures that were being depressed triggered program trading---sell sell sell... cover your ass, don't get burned, don't ride this ship down. So now you have a full-on stampede.

NOW you have people that were holding the e-mini contracts that were asleep during this episode suddenly awake with alarm, and they start to sell because now their contract hedge is going down the toilet. You now have a perfect shitstorm of selling.

When Arca put on SLOWDOWN and the e-mini pit recovered after the order finished executing, then you had a stampede of buying from all the traders who saw immediate discounts on everything---everything is now on sale at Dollar Store discount bargain prices. So in a split second, it's now BUY BUY BUY!!!

And more than 50% of that snap recovery were all the folks and program traders trying to reverse their downside trades. They sold low---so they tried to grab all their positions back before they had to print a loss for the day.

In other words, a shitstorm of VERY smart people dumped into unloading a lot of holdings just because one simple program went "BOO!". They saw their collective mistake, and in a few minutes, they tried to reverse the damage so they wouldn't have to report losses.

While the episode went down though, a LOT of people in the tri-state area were having heart attacks.

You use a market order if you have no time to sit and wait for your limit to trigger and you're very motivated to buy or sell to get rid of a stock or to pick a stock up off the floor.

Market orders rule when it's 3:59:50 and you WANT to get that trade done so you don't get exposed to overnight trading and the morning futures market.

Sellers can also throw out non-nonsensical prices just like bidders can offer nonsensical asks.

That's the trouble with some of the algorithms that HFT shops are allowed to run in their boiler room datacenters. Some of these guys can only afford 80ms-400ms of time to create a decision, and that doesn't leave them much room to insert code that takes a 25,000-foot-view of their total order volume and determine if their order flow is making sense or not, dealing with 50,000 one-off situations (such as somebody dumping huge amounts of paper on the futures markets by accident)..

and so the quants who came up with the automation trading algorithms and the programmers who put their drawing-board ideas into software code can only put circuit breakers in their own code that are self-serving, but have no interest to put in any collars that stop the trades if it's clear that the trading is damaging the market.

It's really too late now. Retail investors have been bailing out and moving over to safe-havens and leaving the exchanges to hedgies and HFT shops to mutually-masturbate with each other trying to steal each others' money.

You can see the often-said argument that the Flash Crash caused Zero-Prints was due to insanely-low bid prices is not exactly accurate. Sure there was some crazy offers, but look at the trading volume.... it was all execution nonsense coming from the HFT trading systems that was flooding the markets with non-sensical orders.

I kind of wish the exchanges DIDNT reverse the trades. It would have wiped out more than 3/4ths of all the HFT shops and sent them packing. Now I won't even dare put any IRA/401(k) money in equities much less any in cash brokerage, unless it's a company with astronomical cash balances and pays a fat dividend--which is hardly nobody.

I won't invest in mutual funds anymore because there's no way a tired old fund manager can keep up with constantly-changing HFT strategy.

This isn't the true picture of what happened.

The pit where this drama went down was JUST the S&P 500 e-mini futures pit. Here's the tick by tick and audio of the pit boss having a heart attack over it. This was the pit where the fat-fingered trade happened. Actually, it wasn't exactly a fat-finger but a mistimed trade... it was supposed to take 5 hours to sell the futures off in small little bursts, but instead they "flooded the market with paper".

This spilled over into the REAL stock exchanges when the futures indexes all trended down, this cause the HFT guys (High Frequency Traders) who trade and/or watch the e-mini market to queue orders to start selling on the actual equity side, which already had shallow liquidity. This caused stocks to break through the 100, 150 and later the 200-day moving averages, which then triggered off the program selling.

NYSE at this point had already turned on their SLOWDOWN code which caused all the HFT computer systems to think that there was something wrong at the NYSE, so the order flow that wasn't going to NASDAQ and the tertiary exchanges to get the flood of sell orders.

Everybody who had collars on their stocks to limit-sell at 10% and greater lows then triggered off and a stampede to sell ensued and dropped some S&P500 stocks (like Accenture) to print $0.

The HFT guys were running to their servers and trying to shut everything down while the madness ensued.

So much for all these fancy high speed servers in New Jersey and Connecticut. All it has done is convince the retail investors to toss their money in Treasuries and forget about it.

3PAR. This was supposed to be Dell's answer for being SUB-PAR.

If Maryland troopers with the sideways hats behave like that in the name of Public Trust, I don't trust them.

And that's exactly why the State of Maryland will lose in court.

I think you might also risk catching something if you're *thrusting* the author.

Oh this is like the last time they tried to censor information about Avian Fl*COUGH*COUGH*burp*hack*COUGH*cough... :-(~~~~~~~

Is this different than someone deciding to run a bash script that wipes their hard drive, as root?

So you can install an extension that's bad. Like you can open an e-mail attachment that's bad. Like you can open a programmable document that has a bad macro.

Seriously, where's the security concern? Don't install crap extensions and you won't have your passwords stolen through crap extensions. Easy enough?

If the data was recorded by Dell computers... then yeah I would expect that 90% of business customers aren't able to read it back.

There is an app for this and it's called Asterisk.

You can also do this with sipgate via Asterisk on any cell phone if you publish a sipgate number and route through to your cell and configure Asterisk do the filtering, which it can also intercept a whitelist/blacklist caller and then start playing games with them.

The cheap way of doing this is to let Google Voice be your answering machine, and change your voice message to "Hello? (4 second pause) Oh I'm sorry I'm not here." That is enough to trick most autodialers into routing your voicemail to a live operator, who then has the option of revealing who they are or hanging up and calling again. I don't accept blocked/800/877 and Unavailable caller ID. At least with Google Voice's translate feature I can bulk delete most of the crap voicemails without listening to them and if I did dump a call to VMX that was a legit caller I can read their voicemail and return it.

Microsoft Fast Page Flip Lick Moistener (TM). It's for when you moisten your index or other page-flipping finger on your tongue to flip faster.