Streetwise Professor

The United States has filed criminal charges against on Navinder Sarao, of London, for manipulation via “spoofing” (in the form of “layering”) and “flashing.” The most attention-grabbing aspect of the complaint is that Sarao engaged in this activity on 6 May, 2010-the day of the Flash Crash. Journalists have run wild with this allegation, concluding that he caused the Crash.

Sarao’s layering strategy involved placement of sell orders at various levels more than two ticks away from the best offer. At his request, “Trading Software Company #1” (I am dying to know who that would be) created an algorithm implemented in a spreadsheet that would cancel these orders if the inside market got close to these resting offers, and replace them with new orders multiple levels away from the new inside market. The algorithm would also cancel orders if the depth in the book at better prices fell below a certain level. Similarly, if the market moved away from his resting orders, those orders would be cancelled and reenetered at the designated distances from the new inside market level.

The complaint is mystifying on the issue of how Sarao made money (allegedly $40 million dollars between 2010 and 2014). To make money, you need to buy low, sell high (you read it here first!), which requires actual transactions. And although the complaint details how many contracts Sarao traded and how many trades (e.g., 10682 buys totaling 74380 lots and 8959 sells totaling 74380 lots on 5 May, 2010-big numbers), it doesn’t say how the trades were executed and what Sarao’s execution strategy was.

The complaint goes into great detail regarding the allegedly fraudulent orders that were never executed, it is maddeningly vague on the trades that were. It says only:

[W]hile the dynamic layering technique exerted downward pressure on the market SARAO typically executed a series of trades to exploit his own manipulative activity by repeatedly selling futures  only to buy them back at a slightly lower price. Conversely, when the market mved back upward as a result of SARAO’s ceasing the dynamic layering technique, SARAO typically did the opposite, that is he repeatedly bought contracts only to sell them at a slightly higher price.

But how were these buys and sells executed? Market orders? Limit orders? Since crossing the spread is expensive, I seriously doubt he used market orders: even if the strategy drove down both bids and offers, using aggressive orders would have forced Sarao to pay the spread, making it impossible to profit. What was the sequence? The complaint suggests that he sold (bought) after driving the price down (up). This seems weird: it would make more sense to do the reverse.

In previous cases, Moncada and Coscia (well-summarized here), the scheme allegedly worked by placing limit orders on both sides of the market in unbalanced quantities, and see-sawing back and forth. For instance, the schemers would allegedly place a small buy order at the prevailing bid, and then put big away from the market orders on the offer side. Once the schemer’s bid was hit, the contra side orders would be cancelled, and he would then switch sides: entering a sell order at the inside market and large away-from-market buys. This strategy is best seen as a way of earning the spread. Presumably its intent is to increase the likelihood of execution of the at-the-market order by using the big contra orders to induce others with orders at the inside market to cancel or reprice. This allowed the alleged manipulators to earn the spread more often than they would have without using this “artifice.”

But we don’t have that detail in Sarao. The complaint does describe the “flashing” strategy in similar terms as in Moncada and Coscia, (i.e., entering limit orders on both sides of the market) but it does not describe the execution strategy in the layering scheme, which the complaint calls “the most prominent manipulative technique he used.”

If, as I conjecture, he was using something like Moncada and Coscia were alleged to have employed, it is difficult to see how his activities would have caused prices to move systematically one direction or the other as the government alleges. Aggressive orders tend to move the market, and if my conjecture is correct, Sarao was using passive orders. Further, he was buying and selling in almost (and sometimes exactly) equal quantities. Trading involving lots of cancellations plus trades in equal quantities at the bid and offer shares similarities with classic market making strategies. This should not move price systematically one way or the other.

But both with regards to the Flash Crash, and 4 May, 2010, the complaint insinuates that Sarao moved the price down:

As the graph displays, SARAO successfully modified nearly all of his orders to stay between levels 4 and 7 of the sell side of the order book. What is more, Exhibit A shows the overall decline in the market price of the E-Minis during this period.

But on 4 May, Sarao bought and sold the exact same number of contracts (65,015). How did that cause price to decline?

Attributing the Flash Crash to his activity is also highly problematic. It smacks of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning. Or look at it this way. The complaint alleges that Sarao employed the layering strategy about 250 days, meaning that he caused 250 out of the last one flash crashes. I can see the defense strategy. When the government expert is on the stand, the defense will go through every day. “You claim Sarao used layering on this day, correct?” “Yes.” “There was no Flash Crash on that day, was there?” “No.” Repeating this 250 times will make the causal connection between his trading and Flash Clash seem very problematic, at best. Yes, perhaps the market was unduly vulnerable to dislocation in response to layering on 6 May, 2010, and hence his strategy might have been the straw that broke the camels back, but that is a very, very, very hard case to make given the very complex conditions on that day.

There is also the issue of who this conduct harmed. Presumably HFTs were the target. But how did it harm them? If my conjecture about the strategy is correct, it increased the odds that Sarao earned the spread, and reduced the odds that HFTs earned the spread. Alternatively, it might have induced some people (HFTs, or others) to submit market orders that they wouldn’t have submitted otherwise. Further, HFT strategies are dynamic, and HFTs learn. One puzzle is why away from the market orders would be considered informative, particularly if they are used frequently in a fraudulent way (i.e., they do not communicate any information). HFTs mine huge amounts of data to detect patterns. The complaint alleges Sarao engaged in a pronounced pattern of trading that certainly HFTs would have picked up, especially since allegations of layering have been around ever since the markets went electronic. This makes it likely that there was a natural self-correcting mechanism that would tend to undermine the profitability of any manipulative strategy.

There are also some interesting legal issues. The government charges Sarao under the pre-Dodd-Frank Section 7 (anti-manipulation) of the Commodity Exchange Act. Proving this manipulation claim requires proof of price artificiality, causation, and intent. The customized software might make the intent easy to prove in this case. But price artificiality and causation will be real challenges, particularly if Sarao’s strategy was similar to Moncada’s and Coscia’s. Proving causation in the Flash Crash will be particularly challenging, given the complex circumstances of that day, and the fact that the government has already laid the blame elsewhere, namely on the Wardell-Reed trades. Causation and artificiality arguments will also be difficult to make given that the government is charging him only for a handful of days that he used the strategy. One suspects some cherry-picking. Then, of course, there is the issue of whether the statute is Constitutionally vague. Coscia recently lost on that issue, but Radley won on it in Houston. It’s an open question.

I am less familiar with Section 18 fraud claims, or the burden of proof regarding them. Even under my conjecture, it is plausible that HFTs were defrauded from earning the spread, or that some traders paid the spread on trades they wouldn’t have made. But if causation is an element here, there will be challenges. It will require showing how HFTs (or other limit order traders) responded to the spoofing. That won’t be easy, especially since HFTs are unlikely to want to reveal their algorithms.

The spoofing charge is based on the post-Frankendodd CEA, with its lower burden of proof (recklessness not intent, and no necessity of proving an artificial price). That will be easier for the government to make stick. That gives the government considerable leverage. But it is largely unexplored territory: this is almost a case of first impression, or at least it is proceeding in parallel with other cases based on this claim, and so there are no precedents.

There are other issues here, including most notably the role of CME and the CFTC. I will cover those in a future post. Suffice it to say that this will be a complex and challenging case going forward, and the government is going to have to do a lot more explaining before it is possible to understand exactly what Sarao did and the impact he had.

The commodity trading sector is remarkable for the prevalence of private ownership, even among the largest firms. My recent white paper discusses this issue in some detail. In a nutshell, publicly-held equity is a risk sharing mechanism. The ability of commodity traders to share some of their largest risks-notably, commodity flat price risks-through the derivatives markets reduces the need to rely on public equity. Moreover, private ownership can mitigate agency problems between equity owners and managers: the equity owners are often the managers. As a consequence, private ownership is more viable in the commodity trading sector.

The biggest cost of this ownership structure is that it constrains the ability to fund large investments in fixed assets. Thus, private ownership can impede a firm’s ability to pursue asset heavy strategies. As I note in this white paper, and my earlier one, commodity firms have used various means to loosen this constraint, including perpetual debt, and spinoffs of equity from asset-heavy subsidiaries.

Another cost is that owners tend to be poorly diversified. But to the extent that the benefits of high powered incentives exceed this cost, private ownership remains viable.

Cargill is the oldest, and one of the largest, of the major privately held commodity traders. (Whether it is biggest depends on whether you want to consider Koch a commodity trader.) It is now commemorating its 150th anniversary: its history began as the American Civil War ended. Greg Meyer and Neil Hume have a nice piece in the FT that discusses some of Cargill’s challenges. Foremost among these is funding its ambitious plans in Indonesia and Brazil.

The article also details the tensions between Cargill management, and the members of the Cargill and McMillan families who still own 90 percent of the firm.

The last family member to serve as chief executive retired in 1995, and now only one family member works full time there. This raises questions about how long the company will remain private, despite management’s stated determination to keep it that way. The families are already chafing due to their inability to diversify. Further, at Cargill private ownership no longer serves to align the incentives of owners and managers, in contrast to firms like Trafigura, Vitol, and Gunvor: even though Cargill is private, the owners aren’t the managers. Thus, the negatives of private ownership are becoming more prominent, and the benefits are diminishing. There is separation of ownership and control, with its associated incentive problems, but there is no compensating benefit of diversification.

Indeed, it is arguable that the company remains private because of agency problems. Current management, which does not own a large fraction of the firm, is not incentivized to de-privatize: there would be no big payday for them from going public, because they own little equity, and they would give up the perquisites attendant to controlling a vast corporation. Moreover, as long as the families can be kept happy, management doesn’t have to worry about capital market discipline or nosy analysts. Thus, management may be well entrenched in the current private structure, and the number of family owners (about 100) could make it difficult to form a coalition that would force the company to go public, or to craft a package that would make it worth management’s while to pursue that option.

In sum, Cargill is a marvelous company, and has been amazingly successful over the years. Its longevity as a private company is remarkable. But there are grounds to wonder whether that structure is still efficient, or whether it persists because it benefits management.

In October, 2011 I was in a group of academics invited to meet the Board of Governors of the Fed to discuss our research. The theme was network industries, and I was to make a presentation on the network aspects of clearing and its implications for systemic risk.

My most vivid memory of the meeting has little to do with my presentation. Instead, it relates to Ben Bernanke, who sat facing me, directly across the massive boardroom table. Bernanke obviously had a headache. He was rubbing his temples, and he asked a staffer to bring him a cold can of Diet Mountain Dew, which he held against his forehead while closing his eyes. Figuring that a Bernanke headache would portend bad financial news, I was sorely tempted to excuse myself to call my broker to sell the hell out of the S&P.

Sitting next to me was Governor Daniel Tarullo. Truth be told, I was not impressed by his questions, which seemed superficial, or his mien, which was rather brusque, not to say grouchy.

He was definitely not sympathetic to my warning about the potential systemic risks of clearing: he made some skeptical, and in fact dismissive, comments. It was quite evident that he was a believer in clearing mandates.

It appears that Tarullo is still struggling with the idea that CCPs are a risk, but at least he’s open to the possibility:

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and BlackRock Inc. have argued for years that a key response to the last financial crisis could help fuel the next one. [What? No mention of SWP? I was way ahead of them!] Global regulators are starting to heed their warnings.

At issue is the role of clearinghouses — platforms that regulators turned to following the 2008 meltdown to shed more light on the $700 trillion swaps market. A pivotal goal was ensuring that losses at one bank don’t imperil a wide swath of companies, and the broader economy.

Now, Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo is quizzing Wall Street after big lenders and asset managers said clearinghouses pose their own threats, said three people with knowledge of the discussions who weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Among the concerns raised by financial firms: Relying on clearinghouses shifts risk to just a handful of entities, and the collapse of one could lead to uncapped losses for banks.

. . . .

Tarullo, the Fed’s point man on financial regulation and oversight, has publicly conceded that it’s hard for banks to determine their own market risks if they can’t evaluate how badly they would be hit by the failure of a clearinghouse. It’s “worth considering” whether clearinghouses have enough funds to handle major defaults, he said in a Jan. 30 speech.

Tarullo’s speech is here. Although he is still obviously a clearing fan, at least he is starting to recognize some of the problems. In particular, he acknowledges that it necessary to consider the interaction between CCPs and the broader financial system. Though I must say that since he mentions multilateral netting as the primary reason why CCPs contribute to financial stability, and margins as the second, it’s painfully evident that he doesn’t grasp the fundamental nature of clearing. In the first instance, netting and collateral just redistribute losses, and it is not clear that this redistribution enhances stability. In the second instance, although he acknowledges the problems with margin pro cyclicality, he doesn’t explicitly recognize the strains that large margin flows put on liquidity supply, and the destabilizing effect of these strains.

So it’s a start, but there’s a long way to go.

Tarullo pays most attention to the implications of CCP failure, and to measures to reduce the likelihood of this failure. Yes, failure of a large CCP would be catastrophic, but as I’ve oft written, the measures designed to save them can be catastrophic too.

Tarullo would be well-advised to read this short piece by Michael Beaton, which summarizes many of the issues quite well. The last few paragraphs are worth quoting in full:

In general, I think what we need to take away from all of this is that systemic risk can be transferred – it’s arguable whether or not it can be reduced – but it certainly can’t be eliminated, and the clearing model that we are working towards is a hub and spoke which concentrates risk on a very, very small number of names.

A decentralised network is arguably stronger than a hub and spoke model, mainly because open systems are generally regarded as more robust than closed ones. The latter is what the clearing model operates on and you have that single, glaring point of failure, and there’s really no escape from that.

So, going back to the original questions – do I think the proposals are enough?  I think it goes a long way, but fundamentally I don’t think it will ever resolve the problem of ‘too big to fail’.  I’m just not convinced it’s a problem that is capable of resolution. [Emphasis added.]

Exactly. (The comparison of open vs. closed systems is particularly important.)

Since clearing mandates create their own systemic risks, the Fed, and other central banks, and other macroprudential regulators, must grasp the nettle and determine what central bank support will be extended to CCPs in a crisis. Greenspan extemporized a response in the Crash of ’87, and it worked. But the task will be orders of magnitude greater in the next crisis, given the massively increased scope of clearing. It’s good that Tarullo and the Fed are starting to address these issues, but the mandates are almost 5 years old and too little progress has been made. Faster, please.

The CFTC has filed a complaint against Kraft and Mondelez Global, accusing the companies of manipulating the December, 2011 CBT Wheat Futures Contract. A few comments, based on what is laid out in the complaint (and therefore not on a full evaluation of all relevant facts and data):

1. A trader executes a market power manipulation (i.e., a corner or a squeeze) by taking excessive, and uneconomic, deliveries on a futures contract. This causes the calendar spread to increase, and the basis at locations where delivery does not (or cannot) occur to fall. The complaint alleges that Kraft took large deliveries. The relevant calendar spread (December-March) rose sharply, and according to Kraft emails cited in the complaint, the basis at Toledo declined. Thus, the facts in the CFTC complaint support a plausible allegation that Kraft and Mondelez executed a market power manipulation/corner/squeeze.
2. A cornerer takes uneconomic deliveries. That is, the deliveries taken are not the cheapest source of the physical commodity for the cornerer. The complaint does not provide sufficient detail to determine with precision whether this was the case here (but discovery will!), but it does include circumstantial evidence. Specifically, Kraft took delivery on the Mississippi, whereas it needed physical wheat at its mill in Toledo. Further, Kraft did not use most of the wheat it bought via delivery. Instead, it sold it, which is consistent with “burying the corpse.” In addition, given cash bids in Toledo and the futures price at which the defendants took delivery, it is highly likely that it was cheaper for Kraft to buy wheat delivered to its mill in Toledo than it was to take delivery (at an opportunity cost equal to the futures price) and pay load out and freight costs to move the wheat from the Mississippi to Toledo. Again, though, the complaint doesn’t provide direct evidence of this.
3. A cornerer liquidates a large fraction of its futures position: whereas it loses money on the deliveries it takes, it makes money by liquidating futures at a super competitive price. Kraft liquidated more than half its futures position. This provides further evidence that it did not establish its futures position as a means of securing the cheapest source of cash wheat, and is consistent with the execution of a corner/squeeze.
4. A processor hedging anticipated cash purchases doesn’t buy calendar spreads. The complaint quotes an email stating that Kraft did.
5. One clunker in the complaint is the allegation that Kraft’s actions “proximately caused cash wheat prices in Toledo to decline.” Market power manipulation when Toledo is not the cheapest to deliver location (as was evidently the case here, as deliveries did not occur in Toledo) would be expected to reduce the Toledo basis (i.e., the difference between the Toledo cash price and the December futures price), and there is some evidence in the complaint that this occurred. But this is different from causing the flat price of wheat to decline, which is what the CFTC alleges. Any coherent theory of market power manipulation implies that a corner or squeeze would increase, or at least not reduce, the cash price at locations where delivery does not occur, but that the rise in the cash price at these locations is smaller than the rise in the futures price (and in the cash price at the delivery location). This results in a compression of the basis, but a rise (or non-decline) in flat prices.
6. In sum, the complaint presents a plausible case that Kraft-Mondelez executed a market power manipulation.
7. But the CFTC doesn’t come out and allege a corner, squeeze, or market power manipulation: these words are totally absent. Instead, the agency relies on its shiny new anti-manipulation authority conferred by Frankendodd under section 6(c)(1) of the Commodity Exchange Act, and CFTC Rule 180.1 that it adopted to implement this authority. This is essentially a Xerox of the SEC’s Rule 10b-5, and proscribes the employment of any “deceptive or manipulative device.” That is, this is basically an anti-fraud rule that has nothing to do with market power and therefore it is ill-adapted to reaching the exercise of market power.
8. The CFTC no doubt is doing this because under 6(c)(1) and Rule 180.1 the CFTC has a lower burden of proof than under its pre-Frankendodd anti-manipulation authority. Specifically, it does not have to show that Kraft-Mondelez had specific intent to manipulate the market, as was the case prior to Dodd-Frank. Instead, “recklessness” suffices. Further, it does not have to demonstrate that the price of wheat was artificial. In my view, the straightforward application of economics permits determination of both specific intent and price artificiality, but earlier decisions like Indiana Farm and in re Cox make it difficult to for the CFTC to do so. Or at least that’s what CFTC believes.
9. Although I understand the CFTC’s choice, it has jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Why? Well, to mix metaphors, there is a square peg-round hole problem. As I’ve been shouting about for years, fraud-based manipulations and market power manipulations are very different, and using a statute that targets fraudulent (“deceptive”) actions to prosecute a market power manipulation is likely to end in tears because the legal concept does not fit the allegedly manipulative conduct. The DOJ learned this to its dismay in the Radley case (which grew out of the BP propane corner in 2004). Even though BP executed a garden variety corner, the DOJ alleged that the company engaged in a massive fraud. Judge Miller found this entirely unpersuasive, and shot down the DOJ in flames. The CFTC risks the exact same outcome. Tellingly, it asserts in a conclusory fashion that Kraft-Mondelez employed a “deceptive or manipulative contrivance” but doesn’t say: (a) what that device was, (b) how Kraft’s taking of a large number of deliveries deceived anyone, (c) who was deceived, and (d) how the deception affected prices.

It will be interesting to see what happens going forward. The CFTC is obviously using this as a test case of its new authority. Perhaps it thinks it is being crafty (or would that be Krafty?) but I fear that by using a law and rule targeted against fraudulent conduct to prosecute a market power manipulation, the agency will just be finding a new way to screw up manipulation law, thereby undermining, rather than strengthening, deterrence of market power manipulation.

So will the Beastie Boys be singing about the CFTC? We’ll see, but I’m not hopeful.

The Industrial Energy Consumers of America has submitted a comment letter on the CFTC’s position limit rule making. The letter contains this libel:

If one looks at the agenda from the February 26, 2015 meeting (see below), other than CFTC presenters, every presenter has views that are not consistent with CFTC action to set speculative position limits. Professor Pirrong has a long history of client paid studies in this area and will need to identify who paid for the underlying data and study for his results to be credible on this subject.

The Options Clearing Corporation (“OCC”) and the exchanges that own it (Chicago Board Options Exchange, Incorporated, International Securities Exchange, LLC, NASDAQ OMX PHLX LLC, NYSE MKT LLC, and NYSE Arca) are embroiled in a dispute with virtually everyone else in the options business regarding its new capital plan. Pursuant to its designation as a “Systemically Important Financial Market Utility” (“SIFMU”) under Frankendodd, OCC was required to boost capital from $25 million to nearly $250 million. Part of this will be obtained through retained earnings, with an additional $150 million via a capital injection from the four owner-exchanges. In addition, CBOE et al promise to inject up to $117 million in the event of “unexpected losses”, which would be most likely to occur during a financial crisis.

In return, the owner-exchanges receive in essence preferred stock, which pays a dividend in perpetuity. The exact amount of the dividend is not known publicly, but those objecting to the plan (including BATS and KCG) claim that it could be as much as 16-19 pct, at least in the first few years of the plan’s operation.

Non-owner exchanges like BATS and market users like KCG are furious, claiming that the the capital plan allows OCC’s owners to “monetize” the rents accruing to its status as the monopoly clearer for options transactions in the US. They believe that OCC will pay for the dividend by charging super competitive fees that will impair competition among exchanges (advantaging the owner exchanges over the non-owners) and will burden market users.

This is a difficult issue, the nature of OCC. Here are some thoughts:

1. OCC is a regulated monopoly, and arguably a natural monopoly.This creates the traditional conflict between the owners of the utility and its customers, which include other exchanges that aren’t owners (like BATS) and clearing firms and market users (like KCG). This is in many ways very similar to a dispute between a traditional electric utility and its ratepayers heard before a state utility commission, with the exception that this is before the SEC.

2. Like a traditional are case involving a regulated utility, the dispute here is over what is a fair rate of return on capital. BATS and KCG are objecting to the rate of return the 4 exchange owners of OCC are being promised for their capital contribution, and the process by which the SEC approved this rate of return.

3. It is particularly challenging to determine a “fair” rate of return on this capital because of the unique risks that the OCC exchanges are assuming. This capital is at risk of taking a big hit, and the owner-exchanges are potentially obligated to make additional capital contributions, during periods of financial crisis (the “dire circumstances”) referred to in BATS’s letter to the SEC. This tends to make this capital very expensive, and it should therefore earn a relatively high rate of return (high dividend). Capital that has bad returns when the market is doing poorly overall-“high beta”, if you will-is expensive capital. The type of capital being provided is fraught with wrong-way risk: it is likely to take a hit precisely when the capital suppliers are least able to afford it. Determining how much of a risk premium is warranted is a challenge, because of the exceptional nature of the risk. In essence, the exchanges are assuming tail risk, i.e., the risk of exceptional events, and it is inherently difficult to evaluate and price these risks.

4. The other exchanges and firms like KCG benefit from the risk bearing capital supplied by the owner exchanges. Otherwise, they would have to bear the risk. But of course they would like to underpay for this benefit, just as the owner exchanges might want to overcharge for it.

5. In other words, this situation is tailor made for disputes. Monopoly rate setting to determine fair rates and a fair rate of return on capital with very unusual and hard to evaluate risks.

6. The fears about the effects of pricing on inter-exchange competition in execution service are misdirected. Yes, it is possible that the owner exchanges will capture monopoly rents accruing to the OCC’s dominant position, but traditional “one monopoly rent” analysis implies that they don’t have an incentive to use OCC pricing power to advantage their competitive position in execution services. Indeed, the opposite is true.

This also highlights some organization, ownership and governance issues that I addressed in my research on exchanges that culminated in my 2000 JLE piece. Exchanges (and clearinghouses) have market power, and serve disparate and heterogeneous interests. They can use pricing to redistribute rents (which accrue in part due to market power) from one group of intermediaries to another. Not-for-profit status and mutual ownership (having the exchange or CCP operate as a non-profit “utility” serving disparate intermediary-owners is a way of reducing rent seeking and mitigating the use of pricing to redistribute rents.

But non-profit, mutual organization comes at a cost. It requires highly participative, committee-heavy governance that slows decision making and often creates gridlock that makes it difficult for the exchanges/CCPs to respond to technology, regulatory, or market shocks. (Look at the CBT in the 1990s and early-2000s if you want an example.) If everybody has a voice and a vote, it is very difficult to get things done.

In sum, “financial market utility” pricing and governance is inherently messy and controversial.  It has all of the problems associated with public utility regulation, and then some. The problems are particularly daunting when it comes to capitalizing, allocating and pricing the systemic and wrong way risks that CCPs bear. Given these complexities, I won’t venture an opinion here, except to say that (a) I can see both sides of the argument here, and (b) this ain’t going away anytime soon.

Rodney Garrett and Peter Zimmerman of the NY Fed have produced a paper studying the effect of clearing on derivatives counterparty risk exposures. It is basically an extension of the Duffle-Zhu paper from a few years ago. It studies more realistic networks and a more diverse set of scenarios than D-Z. It demonstrates that with a variety of network structures, clearing actually reduces netting efficiency and increases counterpart risk exposures. This is especially true with “scale free” or “core-periphery” networks, which are more realistic representations of actual derivatives markets than the all-to-all structure in D-Z. They show that when the system relies on relatively few crucial nodes, as is the case in most dealer structures, clearing reduces netting efficiency. This, as Garrett and Zimmerman note, could explain why clearing has not been adopted voluntarily. It also raises doubts about the advisability of clearing mandates, inasmuch as the alleged benefit of clearing is a reduction in counterparty credit exposures.

A few comments. The results, taken on their own terms, make sense. In particular, networks connecting dealers and customers via derivatives transactions, are endogenous. And although network structures are not necessarily efficient due to network externalities and path dependence, there are forces that lead to minimizing credit exposures. thus, although it would be Panglossian to assert that existing structures minimize these exposures, it should not be surprising that interventions that lead to dramatic alterations to networks increase counterparty risk exposures as existing networks are configured at least in part to reduce these exposures.

More importantly, though, there is the issue of whether counterparty risk exposure in derivatives transactions is the proper metric to evaluate the effect of clearing mandates. As I have noted for  years (as has Mark Roe), when participants in derivatives transactions have other liabilities, changes in netting efficiency in derivatives primarily redistribute wealth to or from one group of creditors (derivatives counteparties) from or to other creditors (e.g., unsecured lenders, commercial paper purchasers, deposit insurers). Netting and offset essentially privilege the creditors that can use them, at the expense of others who cannot. So telling me policy A reduces counterparty risk exposures by netting provides me very little information about the systemic effects of the policy. To understand the systemic effects, you need to understand the distributive effects across the full set of creditors impacted by the change in derivatives netting efficiency induced by the policy–and that would be every creditor of derivatives market participants. This paper, like all others in the area, does not do that.

Put another way. Papers in this literature say little about systemic risk because they only analyze a piece of the system. The derivatives-centric approach is of little value in assessing systemic risk. To analyze systemic risk, you need to analyze the system, not a piece of it.

What’s more, shuffling around credit risk is probably not the most important effect of clearing mandates, even though it receives the vast bulk of the attention. As I’ve written repeatedly in the past, including here, clearing reduces credit risk by increasing liquidity risk, most notably, through variation margining which results in the need to obtain cash in a hurry to meet margin calls, which can be large when there are large market shocks. The expansion of clearing to OTC markets which dwarf listed derivatives potentially leads to orders-of-magnitude increases in liquidity needs.

It is these liquidity demands which create huge potential systemic risks. Financial crises are usually liquidity crises: mechanisms such as clearing increase demands for liquidity in stressed market conditions, and do so in a way that increases the rigidity and tightness of the coupling in the financial system. This is extremely dangerous. Tight coupling in particular is associated with system failure in a variety of real world systems including both financial and non-financial systems.

Indeed, all of the attempts to make CCPs invulnerable all tend to exacerbate these problems. This raises the possibility that CCPs could be bastions surviving in the midst of a completely rubbled financial system.

In sum, papers like the Garrett-Zimmerman work are very elegant and technically sophisticated, and help answer a question: Does clearing reduce derivatives counterparty risk exposures? But all the elegance and technical sophistication is likely for naught given that the question is the wrong question, or a very incomplete one.

My latest white paper, “Not too big to fail: Systemic Risk, Regulation, and the Economics of Commodity Trading Firms” was released today. A video of me discussing it can be found here (as can my earlier white papers on commodity traders and LNG trading).

The conclusion in a nutshell: commodity trading firms do not pose systemic risks, and therefore it is inappropriate to subject them to bank-like prudential regulations, including capital requirements. Commodity trading firms are not systemically risky because (a) they aren’t really that big, (b) they are not that highly leveraged, (c) their leverage is not fragile, (d) the financial distress of a big trader is unlikely to result in contagious runs on others, or fire sale problems, and (e) their financial performance is not highly pro cyclical. Another way to see it is that banks are fragile because they engage in maturity and liquidity transformations, whereas commodity trading firms don’t: they engage in different transformations altogether.

Commodity traders are in line to be subject to Capital Requirement Directive IV starting in 2017. If the rules turn out to be binding, they will cause firms to de-lever by shrinking, or issue more equity (which may force them to forego private ownership, which aligns the interests of owners and managers). These will be costs, not offset by any systemic benefit. All pain, no gain.

It is my understanding that banks obviously think differently, and are calling for “consistent” regulations across banks, commodity traders, and other intermediaries. Since these firms differ on many dimensions, imposing the same regulations on all makes little sense. Put differently, apropos Emerson, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Or bankers who want to handicap competitors.

The white paper has received some good coverage, including the Financial Times, Reuters, and Bloomberg. I will be writing more about it when I return to the states later in the week.

China is notorious for flouting intellectual property rights. From stolen technology (including notably military gear) to designer knock-offs, China pirates everything and everyone. It is therefore a rather jaw-dropping act of chutzpah for to Chinese Zhengzhou Commodities Exchange to send a nasty cease-and-desist letter to the Singapore subsidiary of ICE demanding that ICE not copy ZCE’s cotton and sugar contracts:

Intercontinental Exchange has been forced to delay the launch of its new Singapore platform after a Chinese exchange threatened legal action to stop the US group launching two commodity futures that are copies of contracts offered in China.

The move by the Zhengzhou Commodity Exchange is likely to send shockwaves through the global futures industry because it signals that China will not tolerate foreign exchanges copying its futures contracts, and comes despite the practice of offering “lookalike” contracts being accepted around the world for years.

The ICE contracts are not copies, exactly. Similar to its “NYMEX lookalike” contracts, which cash settle against the expiring NYMEX future, the ICE Singapore commodity contracts are to be cash settled based on the settlement price of the expiring ZCE future. The ZCE future is delivery-settled. Meaning that the delivery mechanism ensures convergence between physical and futures prices, and the lookalike contract can ensure convergence by cash-settling against the delivery-settled contract.

The issues here are common to all intellectual property controversies. Strong intellectual property rights impede competition. Against that, free riding off the creativity or investment of others can impede innovation.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to this trade-off. In the case of exchange traded contracts, I tend to lean towards weak intellectual property rights.  The network effects of liquidity tend to weaken competition, and to give incumbents a strong advantage over entrants. There is already a substantial stream of rents to being first that gives strong (and maybe overly-strong) incentives to innovate, making strong intellectual property rights superfluous, and indeed damaging because they place another burden on already weak competition.

The US courts arrived at a similar conclusion, ruling that NYMEX did not have property rights over its settlement prices that it could use to preclude ICE from using them to cash settle its contracts. This is one factor that has encouraged a relatively robust competition in energy derivatives, which is the exception rather than the rule.

In sum, I hope ICE is able to prevail in its battle with ZCE. In part on economic grounds, and in part on the grounds that it burns me to see IP pirates protect their turf by asserting IP, especially over something for which IP is unwarranted.

I have written often of the Clayton Rule of Manipulation, named after a cotton broker who, in testimony before Congress, uttered these wise words:

“The word ‘manipulation’ . . . in its use is so broad as to include any operation of the cotton market that does not suit the gentleman who is speaking at the moment.”

High Frequency Trading has created the possibility of the promiscuous application of the Clayton Rule, because there is a lot of things about HFT that do not suit a lot of gentlemen at this moment, and a lot of ladies for that matter. The CFTC’s Frankendodd-based Disruptive Practices Rule, plus the fraud based manipulation Rule 180.1 (also a product of Dodd-Frank) provide the agency’s enforcement staff with the tools to pursue a pretty much anything that does not suit them at any particular moment.

At present, the thing that least suits government enforcers-including not just CFTC but the Department of Justice as well-is spoofing. As I discussed late last year, the DOJ has filed criminal charges in a spoofing case.

Here’s my description of spoofing:

What is spoofing? It’s the futures market equivalent of Lucy and the football. A trader submits buy (sell) orders above (below) the inside market in the hope that this convinces other market participants that there is strong demand (supply) for (of) the futures contract. If others are so fooled, they will raise their bids (lower their offers). Right before they do this, the spoofer pulls his orders just like Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown, and then hits (lifts) the higher (lower) bids (offers). If the pre-spoof prices are “right”, the post-spoof bids (offers) are too high (too low), which means the spoofer sells high and buys low.

Order cancellation is a crucial component of the spoofing strategy, and this has created widespread suspicion about the legitimacy of order cancellation generally. Whatever you think about spoofing, if such futures market rule enforcers (exchanges, the CFTC, or the dreaded DOJ) begin to believe that traders who cancel orders at a high rate are doing something nefarious, and begin applying the Clayton Rule to such traders, the potential for mischief-and far worse-is great.

Many legitimate strategies involve high rates of order cancellation. In particular, market making strategies, including market making strategies pursued by HFT firms, typically involve high cancellation rates, especially in markets with small ticks, narrow spreads, and high volatility. Market makers can quote tighter spreads if they can adjust their quotes rapidly in response to new information. High volatility essentially means a high rate of information flow, and a need to adjust quotes frequently. Moreover, HFT traders can condition their quotes in a given market based on information (e.g., trades or quote changes) in other markets. Thus, to be able to quote tight markets in these conditions, market makers need to be able to adjust quotes frequently, and this in turn requires frequent order cancellations.

Order cancellation is also a means of protecting market making HFTs from being picked off by traders with better information. HFTs attempt to identify when order flow becomes “toxic” (i.e., is characterized by a large proportion of better-informed traders) and rationally cancel orders when this occurs. This reduces the cost of making markets.

This creates a considerable tension if order cancellation rates are used as a metric to detect potential manipulative conduct. Tweaking strategies to reduce cancellation rates to reduce the probability of getting caught in an enforcement dragnet increases the frequency that a trader is picked off and thereby raises trading costs: the rational response is to quote less aggressively, which reduces market liquidity. But not doing so raises the risk of a torturous investigation, or worse.

What’s more, the complexity of HFT strategies will make ex post forensic analyses of traders’ activities fraught with potential error. There is likely to be a high rate of false positives-the identification of legitimate strategies as manipulative. This is particularly true for firms that trade intensively in multiple markets. With some frequency, such firms will quote one side of the market, cancel, and then take liquidity from the other side of the market (the pattern that is symptomatic of spoofing). They will do that because that can be the rational response to some patterns of information arrival. But try explaining that to a suspicious regulator.

The problem here inheres in large part in the inductive nature of legal reasoning, which generalizes from specific cases and relies heavily on analogy. With such reasoning there is always a danger that a necessary condition (“all spoofing strategies involve high rates of order cancellation”) morphs into a sufficient condition (“high rates of order cancellation indicate manipulation”). This danger is particularly acute in complex environments in which subtle differences in strategies that are difficult for laymen to grasp (and may even be difficult for the strategist or experts to explain) can lead to very different conclusions about their legitimacy.

The potential for a regulatory dragnet directed against spoofing catching legitimate strategies by mistake is probably the greatest near-term concern that traders should have, because such a dragnet is underway. But the widespread misunderstanding and suspicion of HFT more generally means that over the medium to long term, the scope of the Clayton Rule may expand dramatically.

This is particularly worrisome given that suspected offenders are at risk to criminal charges. This dramatic escalation in the stakes raises compliance costs because every inquiry, even from an exchange, demands a fully-lawyered response. Moreover, it will make firms avoid some perfectly rational strategies that reduce the costs of making markets, thereby reducing liquidity and inflating trading costs for everyone.

The vagueness of the statute and the regulations that derive from it pose a huge risk to HFT firms. The only saving grace is that this vagueness may result in the law being declared unconstitutional and preventing it from being used in criminal prosecutions.

Although he wrote in a non-official capacity, an article by CFTC attorney Gregory Scopino illustrates how expansive regulators may become in their criminalization of HFT strategies. In a Connecticut Law Review article, Scopino questions the legality of “high-speed ‘pinging’ and ‘front running’ in futures markets.” It’s frightening to watch him stretch the concepts of fraud and “deceptive contrivance or device” to cover a variety of defensible practices which he seems not to understand.

In particular, he is very exercised by “pinging”, that is, the submission of small orders in an attempt to detect large orders. As remarkable as it might sound, his understanding of this seems to be even more limited than Michael Lewis’s: see Peter Kovac’s demolition of Lewis in his Not so Fast.

When there is hidden liquidity (due to non-displayed orders or iceberg orders), it makes perfect sense for traders to attempt to learn about market depth. This can be valuable information for liquidity providers, who get to know about competitive conditions in the market and can gauge better the potential profitability of supply ing liquidity. It can also be valuable to informed strategic traders, whose optimal trading strategy depends on market depth (as Pete Kyle showed more than 30 years ago): see a nice paper by Clark-Joseph on such “exploratory trading”, which sadly has been misrepresented by many (including Lewis and Scopino) to mean that HFT firms front run, a conclusion that Clark-Joseph explicitly denies. To call either of these strategies front running, or deem them deceptive or fraudulent is disturbing, to say the least.

Scopino and other critics of HFT also criticize the alleged practice of order anticipation, whereby a trader infers the existence of a large order being executed in pieces as soon as the first pieces trade. I say alleged, because as Kovac points out, the noisiness of order flow sharply limits the ability to detect a large latent order on the basis of a few trades.

What’s more, as I wrote in some posts on HFT just about a year ago, and in a piece in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, it’s by no means clear that order anticipation is inefficient, due to the equivocal nature of informed trading. Informed trading reduces liquidity, making it particularly perverse that Scopino wants to treat order anticipation as a form of insider trading (i.e., trading on non-public information). Talk about getting things totally backwards: this would criminalize a type of trading that actually impedes liquidity-reducing informed trading. Maybe there’s a planet on which that makes sense, but its sky ain’t blue.

Fortunately, these are now just gleams in an ambitious attorney’s eye. But from such gleams often come regulatory progeny. Indeed, since there is a strong and vocal constituency to impede HFT, the political economy of regulation tends to favor such an outcome. Regulators gonna regulate, especially when importuned by interested parties. Look no further than the net neutrality debacle.

In sum, the Clayton Rule has been around for the good part of a century, but I fear we ain’t seen nothing yet. HFT doesn’t suit a lot of people, often because of ignorance or self-interest, and as Mr. Clayton observed so long ago, it’s a short step from that to an accusation of manipulation. Regulators armed with broad, vague, and elastic authority (and things don’t get much broader, vaguer, or more elastic than “deceptive contrivance or device”) pose a great danger of running amok and impairing market performance in the name of improving it.