In Search of the Perfect Investment

Late Wednesday March 25, 2015

You and I are being ripped off by high frequency traders. Nothing much has changed.

Let’s start with this very strong (and very indignant) statement by Charles Schwab, Founder and Chairman and Walt Bettinger, President and CEO of April 3, 2014. It’s still on their web site — click here.

Schwab serves millions of investors and has been observing the development of high-frequency trading practices over the last few years with great concern. As we noted in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal last summer, high-frequency trading has run amok and is corrupting our capital market system by creating an unleveled playing field for individual investors and driving the wrong incentives for our commodity and equities exchanges. The primary principle behind our markets has always been that no one should carry an unfair advantage. That simple but fundamental principle is being broken.

High-frequency traders are gaming the system, reaping billions in the process and undermining investor confidence in the fairness of the markets. It’s a growing cancer and needs to be addressed.  If confidence erodes further, the fuel of our free-enterprise system, capital formation, is at risk. We can’t allow that to happen. For sure, we still believe investing in equities is a primary path to long-term wealth creation, and we believe in the long-term structural integrity of the markets to deliver that over time for individual investors, which is all the more reason to be vigilant in removing anything that creates unfair advantage or undermines investor confidence.

On March 18, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced his intention to “continue to shine a light on unseemly practices in the markets,” referring to the practices of high-frequency trading and the support they receive from other parties including the commodities and equities exchanges. He has been a consistent watchdog on this matter. We applaud his effort and encourage the SEC to raise the urgency on the issue and do all they can to stop this infection in our capital markets. Investors are being harmed, and they shouldn’t have to wait any longer.

As Michael Lewis shows in his new book Flash Boys, the high-frequency trading cancer is deep. It has become systematic and institutionalized, with the exchanges supporting it through practices such as preferential data feeds and developing multiple order types designed to benefit high-frequency traders. These traders have become the exchanges favored clients; today they generate the majority of transactions, which create market data revenue and other fees. Data last year from the Financial Information Forum showed this is no minor blip. High-frequency trading pumped out over 300,000 trade inquiries each second last year, up from just 50,000 only seven years earlier. Yet actual trade volume on the exchanges has remained relatively flat over that period. It’s an explosion of head-fake ephemeral orders – not to lock in real trades, but to skim pennies off the public markets by the billions. Trade orders from individual investors are now pawns in a bigger chess game.

The United States capital markets have been the envy of the world in creating a vibrant, stable and fair system supported by broad public participation for decades. Technology has been a central part of that positive story, especially in the last 30 years, with considerable benefit to the individual investor. But today, manipulative high-frequency trading takes advantage of these technological advances with a growing number of complex institutional order types, enabling practitioners to gain millisecond time advantages and cut ahead in line in front of traditional orders and with access to market data not available to other market participants.

High-frequency trading isn’t providing more efficient, liquid markets; it is a technological arms race designed to pick the pockets of legitimate market participants. That flies in the face of our markets’ founding principles. Historically, regulation has sought to protect investors by giving their orders priority over professional orders. In racing to accommodate and attract high-frequency trading business to their markets, the exchanges have turned this principle on its head. Through special order types, enhanced data feeds and co-location, professionals are given special access and entitlements to jump ahead of investor orders. Last year, more than 95 percent of high-frequency trader orders were cancelled, suggesting something else besides trading is at the heart of the strategy. Some high-frequency traders have claimed to be profitable on over 99 percent of their trading days. Our understanding of statistics tells us this isn’t possible without some built in advantage. Instead of leveling the playing field, the exchanges have tilted it against investors.

Here are examples of the practices that should concern us all:

• Advantaged treatment: Growing numbers of complex order types afford preferential treatment to professional traders’ orders, most notably to jump ahead of retail limit orders.
• Unequal access to information: Exchanges allow high-frequency traders to purchase faster data feeds with detailed information about market trading activity and the specific trading of various types of market participants. This further tilts the playing field against the individual investor, who is already at an informational disadvantage by virtue of the slower Consolidated Data Stream that brokers are required by rule to purchase or, even worse, the 15- to 20-minute-delayed quote feed they have public access to.
• Inappropriate use of information: Professionals are mining the detailed data feeds made available to them by the exchanges to sniff out and front-run large institutions (mutual funds and pension funds), which more often than not are investing and trading on behalf of individual investors.
• Added systems burdens, costs and distortions of rapid-fire quote activity: Ephemeral quotes, also called “quote stuffing,” that are cancelled and reposted in milliseconds distort the tape and present risk to the resiliency and integrity of critical market data and trading infrastructure.  The tremendous added costs associated with the expanded capacity and bandwidth necessary to support this added data traffic is ultimately borne in part by individual investors.

There are solutions. Today there is no restriction to pumping out millions of orders in a matter of seconds, only to reverse the majority of them. It’s the life-blood of high-frequency trading. A simple solution would be to establish cancellation fees to discourage the practice of quote stuffing. The SEC and CFTC floated the idea last year. It has great merit. Make the fees high enough and they will eliminate high-frequency trading entirely. But if the practice is simply a scam, as we believe it is, an even better solution is to simply make it illegal. And exchanges should be neutral in the market. They should stop the practice of selling preferential access or data feeds and eliminate order types that allow high-frequency traders to jump ahead of legitimate order flow. These are all simply tools for scamming individual investors.

The integrity of the markets is at the heart of our economy. High-frequency trading undermines that integrity and causes the market to lose credibility and investors to lose trust. This hurts our economy and country. It is time to treat the cancer aggressively.

You would think that if Schwab felt so strongly about high-frequency trading they would have done something — like allow you and I — Schwab clients — to direct our trades to IEX. But they don’t! (You can guess why… keep reading.)

As you may remember, this whole thing started off with the publication a year ago of Michael Lewis’ book Flash Boys. If you haven’t read the book, you really should:

You can buy it here on Amazon — click here.

A year ago, I read his book and wrote about high-speed trading and how it was, I believed, adversely affecting my personal pocketbook. My hope was that with all the publicity — and especially Schwab’s statement above — something would get done. That “something” would allow me to direct my trades away from high-speed traders front-running my orders to the clean, honest exchange called IEX. And over the year, my conversations with IEX suggested that that would eventually happen — especially with the two online brokerage companies I use — Fidelity and Schwab.

No such luck! Today, I can not direct my Fidelity or Schwab trades to IEX. That can only mean one thing; they’re selling the information about my orders to high-speed traders. And I’m being screwed. Royally.

What got me all stared on this (again) was an article that Michael Lewis published in the latest issue of Vanity Fair —  Michael Lewis Reflects on His Book Flash Boys, a Year After It Shook Wall Street to Its Core.

Here are some excerpts from his piece:

 In the past 11 months, the U.S. stock market has been as chaotic as a Cambodian construction site. At times the noise has sounded like preparations for the demolition of a hazardous building. At other times it has sounded like a desperate bid by a slumlord to gussy the place up to distract inspectors. In any case, the slumlords seem to realize that doing nothing is no longer an option: too many people are too upset. Brad Katsuyama explained to the world what he and his team had learned about the inner workings of the stock market. The nation of investors was appalled—a poll of institutional investors in late April 2014, conducted by the brokerage firm ConvergEx, discovered that 70 percent of them thought that the U.S. stock market was unfair and 51 percent considered high-frequency trading “harmful” or “very harmful.” And the complaining investors were the big guys, the mutual funds and pension funds and hedge funds you might think could defend themselves in the market. One can only imagine how the little guy felt. The authorities evidently saw the need to leap into action, or to appear to. …

That feeling was eventually shared by the BATS president. His defining moment came when Katsuyama asked him a simple question: Did BATS sell a faster picture of the stock market to high-frequency traders while using a slower picture to price the trades of investors? That is, did it allow high-frequency traders, who knew current market prices, to trade unfairly against investors at old prices? The BATS president said it didn’t, which surprised me. On the other hand, he didn’t look happy to have been asked. Two days later it was clear why: it wasn’t true. The New York attorney general had called the BATS exchange to let them know it was a problem when its president went on TV and got it wrong about this very important aspect of its business. BATS issued a correction and, four months later, parted ways with its president…..

From that moment, no one who makes his living off the dysfunction in the U.S. stock market has wanted any part of a public discussion with Brad Katsuyama. Invited in June 2014 to testify at a U.S. Senate hearing on high-frequency trading, Katsuyama was surprised to find a complete absence of high-frequency traders. (CNBC’s Eamon Javers reported that the Senate subcommittee had invited a number of them to testify, and all had declined.) Instead they held their own roundtable discussion in Washington, led by a New Jersey congressman, Scott Garrett, to which Brad Katsuyama was not invited. For the past 11 months, that’s been the pattern: the industry has spent time and money creating a smoke machine about the contents of Flash Boys but is unwilling to take on directly the people who supplied those contents.

On the other hand, it took only a few weeks for a consortium of high-frequency traders to marshal an army of lobbyists and publicists to make their case for them. These condottieri set about erecting lines of defense for their patrons. Here was the first: the only people who suffer from high-frequency traders are even richer hedge-fund managers, when their large stock-market orders are detected and front-run. It has nothing to do with ordinary Americans.

Which is such a weird thing to say that you have to wonder what is going through the mind of anyone who says it. It’s true that among the early financial backers of Katsuyama’s IEX were three of the world’s most famous hedge-fund managers—Bill Ackman, David Einhorn, and Daniel Loeb—who understood that their stock-market orders were being detected and front-run by high-frequency traders. But rich hedge-fund managers aren’t the only investors who submit large orders to the stock market that can be detected and front-run by high-frequency traders. Mutual funds and pension funds and university endowments also submit large stock-market orders, and these, too, can be detected and front-run by high-frequency traders. The vast majority of American middle-class savings are managed by such institutions.

The effect of the existing system on these savings is not trivial. In early 2015, one of America’s largest fund managers sought to quantify the benefits to investors of trading on IEX instead of one of the other U.S. markets. It detected a very clear pattern: on IEX, stocks tended to trade at the “arrival price”—that is, the price at which the stock was quoted when their order arrived in the market. If they wanted to buy 20,000 shares of Microsoft, and Microsoft was offered at $40 a share, they bought at $40 a share. When they sent the same orders to other markets, the price of Microsoft moved against them. This so-called slippage amounted to nearly a third of 1 percent. In 2014, this giant money manager bought and sold roughly $80 billion in U.S. stocks. The teachers and firefighters and other middle-class investors whose pensions it managed were collectively paying a tax of roughly $240 million a year for the benefit of interacting with high-frequency traders in unfair markets. …

Anyone who still doubts the existence of the Invisible Scalp might avail himself of the excellent research of the market-data company Nanex and its founder, Eric Hunsader. In a paper published in July 2014, Hunsader was able to show what exactly happens when an ordinary professional investor submits an order to buy an ordinary common stock. All the investor saw was that he bought just a fraction of the stock on offer before its price rose. Hunsader was able to show that high-frequency traders pulled their offer of some shares and jumped in front of the investor to buy others and thus caused the share price to rise.

The rigging of the stock market cannot be dismissed as a dispute between rich hedge-fund guys and clever techies. It’s not even the case that the little guy trading in underpants in his basement is immune to its costs. In January 2015 the S.E.C. fined UBS for creating order types inside its dark pool that enabled high-frequency traders to exploit ordinary investors, without bothering to inform any of the non-high-frequency traders whose orders came to the dark pool. The UBS dark pool happens to be, famously, a place to which the stock-market orders of lots of small investors get routed. The stock-market orders placed through Charles Schwab, for instance. When I place an order to buy or sell shares through Schwab, that order is sold by Schwab to UBS. Inside the UBS dark pool, my order can be traded against, legally, at the “official” best price in the market. A high-frequency trader with access to the UBS dark pool will know when the official best price differs from the actual market price, as it often does. Put another way: the S.E.C.’s action revealed that the UBS dark pool had gone to unusual lengths to enable high-frequency traders to buy or sell stock from me at something other than the current market price. This clearly does not work to my advantage. Like every other small investor, I would prefer not to be handing some other trader a right to trade against me at a price worse than the current market price. But my misfortune explains why UBS is willing to pay Charles Schwab to allow UBS to trade against my order.

As time passed, the defenses erected by the high-frequency-trading lobby improved. The next was: the author of Flash Boys fails to understand that investors have never had it better, thanks to computers and the high-frequency traders who know how to use them. This line has been picked up and repeated by stock-exchange executives, paid high-frequency-trading spokespeople, and even journalists. It’s not even half true, but perhaps half of it is half true. The cost of trading stocks has fallen a great deal in the last 20 years. These savings were fully realized by 2005 and were enabled less by high-frequency market-making than by the Internet, the subsequent competition among online brokers, the decimalization of stock prices, and the removal of expensive human intermediaries from the stock market. The story Flash Boys tells really doesn’t open until 2007. And since late 2007, as a study published in early 2014 by the investment-research broker ITG has neatly shown, the cost to investors of trading in the U.S. stock market has, if anything, risen—possibly by a lot. …

From his seat onstage beside Warren Buffett at the 2014 Berkshire Hathaway investors’ conference, vice-chairman Charlie Munger said that high-frequency trading was “the functional equivalent of letting a lot of rats into a granary” and that it did “the rest of the civilization no good at all.” I honestly don’t feel that strongly about high-frequency trading. The big banks and the exchanges have a clear responsibility to protect investors—to handle investor stock-market orders in the best possible way, and to create a fair marketplace. Instead, they’ve been paid to compromise investors’ interests while pretending to guard those interests. I was surprised more people weren’t angry with them.

If I didn’t do more to distinguish “good” H.F.T. from “bad” H.F.T., it was because I saw, early on, that there was no practical way for me or anyone else without subpoena power to do it. In order for someone to be able to evaluate the strategies of individual high-frequency traders, the firms need to reveal the contents of their algorithms. They don’t do this. They cannot be charmed or cajoled into doing this. Indeed, they sue, and seek to jail, their own former employees who dare to take lines of computer code with them on their way out the door. ..

In the months after the publication of Moneyball, I got used to reading quotes from baseball insiders saying that the author of the book couldn’t possibly know what he was talking about, as he was not a “baseball expert.” In the 11 months since the publication of Flash Boys, I’ve read lots of quotes from people associated with the H.F.T. lobby saying the author is not a “market-structure expert.” Guilty as charged! Back in 2012, I stumbled upon Katsuyama and his team of people, who knew more about how the stock market actually worked than anyone then being paid to serve as a public expert on market structure. Most of what I know I learned from them. Of course I checked their understanding of the market. I spoke with high-frequency traders and people inside big banks, and I toured the public exchanges. I spoke to people who had sold retail-order flow and people who had bought it. And in the end it was clear that Brad Katsuyama and his band of brothers were reliable sources—that they had learned a lot of things about the inner workings of the stock market that were unknown to the wider public. The controversy that followed the book’s publication hasn’t been pleasant for them, but it’s been fun for me to see them behave as bravely under fire as they did before the start of the war. It’s been an honor to tell their story.

The controversy has come with a price: it has swallowed up the delight an innocent reader might have taken in this little episode in financial history. If this story has a soul, it is in the decisions made by its principal characters to resist the temptation of easy money and to pay special attention to the spirit in which they live their working lives. I didn’t write about them because they were controversial. I wrote about them because they were admirable. That some minority on Wall Street is getting rich by exploiting a screwed-up financial system is no longer news. That is the story of the last financial crisis, and probably the next one, too. What comes as news is that there is now a minority on Wall Street trying to fix the system. Their new stock market is flourishing; their company is profitable; Goldman Sachs remains their biggest single source of volume; they still seem to be on their way to changing the world. All they need is a little help from the silent majority.

You can read Michael’s entire Vanity Fair article here.

Remember, if you have an account with Fidelity or Schwab, you’re being screwed.

Harry Newton who doesn’t know why the market is cratering today, except maybe this stupid headline on MarketWatch: