Streetwise Professor

Michael Lewis’s new book on HFT, Flash Boys, has been released, and has unleashed a huge controversy. Or put more accurately, it has added fuel to a controversy that has been burning for some time.

I have bought the book, but haven’t had time to read it. But I read a variety of accounts of what is in the book, so I can make a few comments based on that.

First, as many have pointed out, although this has been framed as evil computer geniuses taking money from small investors, this isn’t at all the case. If anyone benefits from the tightening of spreads, especially for small trade sizes, it is small investors. Many of them (most, in fact) trade at the bid-ask midpoint via internalization programs with their brokers or through payment-for-order-flow arrangements. (Those raise other issues for another day, but have been around for years and don’t relate directly to HFT.)

Instead, the battle is mainly part of the struggle between large institutional investors and HFT. Large traders want to conceal their trading intentions to avoid price impact. Other traders from time immemorial have attempted to determine those trading intentions, and profit by trading before and against the institutional traders.  Nowadays, some HFT traders attempt to sniff out institutional orders, and profit from that information.  Information about order flow is the lifeblood of those who make markets.

This relates to the second issue. This has been characterized as “front running.” This terminology is problematic in this context. Front running is usually used to describe a broker in an agency relationship with a customer trading in advance of the customer’s order, or disclosing the order to another trader who then trades on that information. This is a violation of the agency relationship between the client and the broker.

In contrast, HFT firms use a variety of means-pinging dark pools, accessing trading and quoting information that is more extensive and obtained more quickly than via the public data feeds-to detect the presence of institutional orders. They are not in an agency relationship with the institution, and have no legal obligation to it.

And this is nothing new. Traders on the floor were always trying to figure out when big orders were coming, and who was submitting them. Sometimes they obtained this information when they shouldn’t have, because a broker violated his obligation. But usually it was from watching what brokers were trading, knowing what brokers served what customers, looking at how anxious the broker appeared, etc.  To throw the floor of the track, big traders would use many brokers. Indeed, one argument for dual trading was that it made it harder for the floor to know the origin of an order if the executing broker dual traded, and might be active because he was trading on his own account rather than for a customer.

This relates too to the third issue: reports that the FBI is investigating for possible criminal violations. Seriously? I remember how the FBI covered itself in glory during the sting on the floors in Chicago in ’89. Not really. The press reports say that the the FBI is investigating whether HFT trades on “non-public information.”  Well, “non-public information” is not necessarily “inside information” which is illegal to trade on:  inside information typically relates to that obtained from someone with a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Indeed, ferreting out non-public information contributes to price discovery: raising the risk of prosecution for trading on information obtained through research or other means, but which is not obtained from someone with a fiduciary relationship to a company, is a dangerous slippery slope that could severely interfere with the operation of the market.

Moreover, it’s not so clear that order flow information is “non-public”.  No, not everyone has it: HFT has to expend resources to get it, but anybody could in theory do that. Anybody can make the investment necessary to ping a dark pool. Anybody can pay to get a faster data feed that allows them to get information that everyone has access to more quickly. Anybody can pay to get quicker access to the data, either through co-location, or the purchase of a private data feed. There is no theft or misappropriation involved. If firms trade on the basis of such information that can be obtained for a price that not everyone is willing to pay, and that is deemed illegal, how would trading on the basis of what’s on a Bloomberg terminal be any different?

Fourth, one reason for the development of dark pools, and the rules that dark pools establish, are to protect order flow information, or to make it less profitable to trade on that information. The heroes of Lewis’s book, the IEX team, specifically designed their system (which is now a dark pool, but which will transition to an ECN and then an exchange in the future) to protect institutional traders against opportunistic HFT. (Note: not all HFT is opportunistic, even if some is.)

That’s great. An example of how technological and institutional innovation can address an economic problem. I would emphasize again that this is not a new issue: just a new institutional response. Once upon a time institutional investors relied on block trading in the upstairs market to prevent information leakage and mitigate price impact. Now they use dark pools. And dark pools are competing to find technologies and rules and protocols that help institutional investors do the same thing.

I also find it very, very ironic that a dark pool is now the big hero in a trading morality tale. Just weeks ago, dark pools were criticized heavily in a Congressional hearing.  They are routinely demonized, especially by the exchanges. The Europeans have slapped very restrictive rules on them in an attempt to constrain the share of trading done in the dark. Which almost certainly will increase institutional trading costs: if institutions could trade more cheaply in the light, they would do so. It will also almost certainly make them more vulnerable to predatory HFT because they will be deprived of the (imperfect) protections that dark pools provide.

Fifth, and perhaps most importantly from a policy perspective, as I’ve written often, much of the problem with HFT in equities is directly the result of the fragmented market structure, which in turn is directly the result of RegNMS. For instance, latency arbitrage based on the slowness of the SIP results from the fact that there is a SIP, and there is a SIP because it is necessary to connect the multiple execution venues. The ability to use trades or quotes on one market to make inferences about institutional trades that might be directed to other markets is also a consequence of fragmentation. As I’ve discussed before, much of the proliferation of order types that Lewis (and others) argue advantage HFT is directly attributable to fragmentation, and rules relating to locked and crossed markets that are also a consequence of RegNMS-driven fragmentation.

Though HFT has spurred some controversy in futures markets, these controversies are quite different, and much less intense. This is due to the fact that many of the problematic features of HFT in equities are the direct consequence of RegNMS and the SEC’s decision (and Congress’s before that) to encourage competition between multiple execution venues.

And as I’ve also said repeatedly, these problems inhere in the nature of financial trading. You have to pick your poison. The old way of doing business, in which order flow was not socialized as in the aftermath of RegNMS, resulted in the domination of a single major execution venue (e.g., the NYSE). And for those with a limited historical memory, please know that these execution venues were owned by their members who adopted rules-rigged the game if you will-that benefited them. They profited accordingly.

Other news from today brings this point home. Goldman is about to sell its NYSE specialist unit, the former Spear, Leeds, which it bought for $6.5 billion (with a B) only 14 years ago.  It is selling it for $30 million (with an M).  That’s a 99.5 decline in market value, folks. Why was the price so high back in 2000? Because under the rules of the time, a monopoly specialist franchise on a near monopoly exchange generated substantial economic rents. Rents that came out of the pockets of investors, including small investors.  Electronic trading, and the socialization of order flow and the resultant competition between execution venues, ruthlessly destroyed those rents.

So it’s not like the markets have moved from a pre-electronic golden age into a technological dystopia where investors are the prey of computerized super-raptors. And although sorting out cause and effect is complicated, the decline in trading costs strongly suggests that the new system, for all its flaws, has been a boon for investors. Until regulators or legislators find the Goldilocks “just right” set of regulations that facilitates competition without the pernicious effects of fragmentation (and in many ways, “fragmentation” is just a synonym for “competition”), we have to choose one or the other. My view is that messy competition is usually preferable to tidy monopoly.

The catch phrase from Lewis’s book is that the markets are rigged. As I tweeted after the 60 Minutes segment on the book, by his definition of rigging, all markets have always been rigged. A group of specialized intermediaries has always exercised substantial influence over the rules and practices of the markets, and has earned rents at the expense of investors. And I daresay it would be foolish to believe this will ever change. My view is that the competition that prevails in current markets has dissipated a lot of those rents (although some of that dissipation has been inefficient, due to arms race effects).

In sum, there doesn’t appear to be a lot new in Lewis’s book. Moreover, the morality tale doesn’t capture the true complexity of the markets generally, or HFT specifically. It has certainly resulted in the release of a lot of heat, but I don’t see a lot of light. Which is kind of fitting for a book in which a dark pool is the hero.

Late last year, the company of My Favorite Neanderthal, Oleg Deripaska’s Rusal, sued the London Metal exchange, claiming that the LME’s new rules on load out of aluminum violated Rusal’s human rights.  Yesterday, a judge in Manchester, UK gave Oleg a victory.

Although the judge found the human rights issue “an interesting and difficult question,” he did not rule on it.  Too bad!  That could have been entertaining.

But he did hand Rusal a victory, ruling that the LME’s process in adopting the new rule was flawed (bonus SWP quote).  As a result, the LME will not implement the rule, and has to go back to the drawing board.

Until a new rule is adopted, the bottleneck in the LME aluminum warehouses (notably Metro in Detroit) will remain stoppered.  Premiums will remain high and volatile.

And that’s the point.  By keeping the huge stocks of aluminum that accumulated in LME warehouses during the financial crisis off the market, the bottleneck keeps the prices of aluminum ex-warehouse artificially high.  This harms consumers, but enhances producers’ profits.  Which is precisely why Rusal sued.

But the victory may well by a Pyrrhic one.  For despite the fact that the warehouse bottleneck props up aluminum prices, and despite the fact that Rusal and other producers have reduced capacity, there is still a substantial supply imbalance that has weighed on prices: due to the bottleneck, prices are higher than they would be otherwise, but they are still quite low.  As a result, Rusal just posted a whopping $3.2 billion loss.

The company is heavily indebted, and the chronic losses imperil its ability to pay this debt.  The company has been frantically negotiating with its lenders, and says that if it does not get relief it will default.  Given that Deripaska has pledged shares as collateral for some borrowings, his status as a billionaire is in jeopardy.

Deripaska has been in such straits before.  He is in some ways the Donald Trump of Russia.  Putin bailed him out in 2008/2009.  Will he do it again?

Although the Euros wring their hands at the costs they would bear if serious economic sanctions were imposed on Russia, as I’ve said, there is a huge asymmetry in vulnerability: Russia is substantially more vulnerable to a cutoff in trade, especially the energy trade.  Take gas.  Germany imports about 12b Euros of gas annually.  Its GDP is about 2.5t Euros.  So natural gas expenditures are about .5 percent of GDP, and even a substantial price increase would represent a relatively small burden on German expenditures.  In contrast, Russian energy exports (63 percent of which are to Europe) account for 50 percent of the country’s budget.  So trade restrictions would be an inconvenience for Europe, and pose an existential challenge for Russia.

Such are the wages of being a petrostate.  Using the energy weapon is national economic suicide.

FT Alphaville has a nice overview of this and other asymmetries.

One quibble, related to this:

In response to Iran-style sanctions, Russia could muster one unprecedented measure. It and its allies could stop buying euros, dollars, and Western government debt. However, Western governments should be able to brush this manoeuvre aside.

If it comes to a trade and finance showdown, it won’t have the money to be buying anything.  So a cutoff of purchases of dollars, euros, etc., is not something that Russia could threaten: it would be an inevitable consequence of a trade and finance war.  And Russia is not such a big buyer that it would make all that much of a difference anyways.

The FTA piece also dispatches the fantasy Russians and their fellow travelers are peddling: that China will assist Russia by waging economic combat against the West.  China is a huge dollar and UST long, so it would be an incredible act of economic masochism to dump dollars or Treasuries.  And Russian fantasies aside, China is not that into them.

The asymmetry of power, especially economic power, couldn’t be more obvious.  But that is counterbalanced by an asymmetry in will, and heretofore that has proved the decisive difference.  Putin has wagered that Europe is unwilling to suffer any discomfort to counterattack against Putin’s anschluss.  So far, he has been right.

In my post from Sunday I mentioned how commodity trading firms require dollar funding and trade in dollars, and that anything that touches a dollar is vulnerable to US sanctions.  This detailed post from The Banker’s Umbrella shows just how much leverage the US has over foreign banks, as a result of the Patriot Act.  The most interesting thing is that you can do a deal in Euros or any other non-dollar currency, but you are vulnerable to asset seizure as long as your bank has a correspondent account at a US bank.  Money quote (pun intended):

So as you can see, from a purely technical perspective, bringing Russia and Putin to his knees is really not that difficult a task. The legislative framework is there and it is brutally effective. The question is does the USA have the political will and the stomach to face the inevitable repercussions of such actions, or is it just easier to say a few words of support in favour of the Ukraine and then let things carry on as before?

Putin surely knows this.  And apropos Obama’s mantra that Russia is acting out of weakness rather than strength, he can only have calculated that the USA (not to mention the Euros) does not “have the political will and stomach” to exploit its strengths and Russia’s weaknesses.

It is remarkable that Gazprom in particular has not been subject to sanctions, given that it will receive stolen property: gas blocks off the Crimean coast, blocks that Ukraine was going to explore.  It is a state company, that helps bankroll the state.  If it isn’t sanctions bait, what company is? And as the Banker’s Umbrella shows, like any other Russian company, it would be extremely vulnerable.

I heard a hilarious story the other day about an incident that occurred when European Commission investigators raided a trading shop in connection with the Brent investigation.  While going through trader emails and documents, one of the crack investigative team came across numerous documents about trading on ICE.  The investigator was puzzled, so he asked the a lawyer for the trading company: “You trade ice?”  Lawyer: “Yes, we trade on ICE.”  Investigator: “You mean you really trade ice?  Frozen water?”  Lawyer: This is my please-tell-me-you’re-sh*tting-me face.

No prizes for figuring out which was Abbot, and which was Costello.

We are in the best of hands.  The best of hands.

With all the Ukraine stuff, and Gunvor, and travel, some things got lost in my spindle.  Time to catch up.

One story is this article about a debate between NASDAQ OMX’s Robert Greifeld and CME Group’s Phupinder Gill.  The “vertical silo” in which an exchange owns both an execution venue and a clearinghouse was a matter of contention:

Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. CEO Robert Greifeld was asked yesterday about the vertical silo and whether it hurts investors.

“Monopolies are great if you own one,” he said during a panel discussion at the annual Futures Industry Association conference in Boca Raton, Florida, paraphrasing a quote he recalled hearing from an investor. His exchanges don’t use this system. “We have yet to find a customer who is in favor of the vertical model,” he said.

A very retro topic here on SWP.  I blogged about it quite a bit in 2006-2007.  Despite that, it’s still a misunderstood subject 😛

Presumably Greifeld believes that eliminating the vertical silo would open up competition in execution.  Yes, there would be competition, but the outcome would likely still be a monopoly in execution given the rules in futures markets.  Under current futures market regulations, there is nothing analogous to RegNMS which effectively socializes order flow by requiring each execution venue to direct orders to any other venue displaying a better price.  Under current futures market regulations, there is no linkage between different execution venues, and no obligation to direct orders to a better priced market.  This leads traders to submit orders to the venue that they expect will be offering the best price.   In this environment, liquidity attracts liquidity, and order flow tips exclusively to a single market.

So opening up clearing would still result in a monopoly execution venue.  There would be competition to be the monopoly, but at the end of the day only one market would remain standing.  Most likely the incumbent (CME in most cases, ICE in some others.)

It is precisely the fact that competition in clearing and execution would lead to bilateral monopolies that drives the formation of a vertical silo.  This eliminates double marginalization problems and reduces the transactions costs arising from opportunism and bargaining that are inherent to bilateral monopoly situations.

Breaking up the vertical silo primarily affects who earns the monopoly rent, and in what form. These outcomes depend on how the silo is broken up.

One alternative is to require the integrated exchange to offer access to its clearinghouse on non-discriminatory terms.  In this case, the one monopoly rent theorem implies that the clearing natural monopoly could extract the entire monopoly rent via its clearing fee.  Indeed, it would have an incentive to encourage competition in execution because this would maximize the derived demand for clearing, and hence maximize the monopoly price.  (This would also allow the integrated exchange to be compensated for its investment in the creation of new contracts, a point Gill emphasizes.  In my opinion, this is a minor consideration.)

Another alternative (which seems to be what Greifeld is advocating) would be to create a utility CCP (a la DTCC) that provides clearing services at cost.  In this case, the winning execution venue will capture the monopoly rent.

To a first approximation, market users would pay the same cost to trade under either alternative. And most likely, the dominant incumbent (CME) would capture the monopoly rent, either in execution fees, or clearing fees, or a combination of the two.  Crucially, however, total costs would arguably be higher with the utility clearer-monopoly execution venue setup, due to the transactions costs associated with coordination, bargaining, and opportunism between separate clearing and execution venues.  (Unfortunately, the phrase “transactions costs” does double duty in this context.  There are the costs that traders incur to transact, and the costs of operating and governing the trading and clearing venues.)

A third alternative would be to move to a structure like that in the US equity market, with a utility clearer and a RegNMS-type socialization of order flow.  Which would result in all the integration and fragmentation nightmares that are currently the subject of so much angst in the equity world.  Do we really want to inflict that on the futures markets?

As I’ve written ad nauseum over the years, there is no Nirvana in trading market structure.  You have a choice between inefficiencies arising from monopoly, or inefficiencies arising from fragmentation.   Not an easy choice, and I don’t know the right answer.

What I do know is that the vertical silo per se is not the problem.  The silo is an economizing response to the natural monopoly tendencies in clearing and execution (when there is no obligation to direct order flow to venues displaying better prices).  The sooner we get away from assuming differently (and the Boca debate is yet another example of our failure to do so) the sooner we will have realistic discussions of the real trade-offs in trading market structure.

That would be me.  At least according to the Google translate version of this profile of me in Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It’s a nice piece, and a fair one (in contrast to some other articles I won’t mention).  Except I am really a mild mannered guy.  Really!

A couple of stray thoughts regarding the Gunvor story.

First, virtually all of the oil trade (and the global commodities trade generally) is done in dollars.  Gunvor needs dollar financing to carry out its trading.  Anything done in dollars puts the provider of the dollar finance in the crosshairs of a panoply of US regulators.

Case in point is RBS, which paid $100 million in settlements to the Fed and the New York Department of Financial Services for violating sanctions on Iran, Burma, Sudan, and Cuba.  One law firm concluded:

A lesson that foreign financial institutions and other multinational companies should draw from these cases is that they continue to face significant risk if they engage in any business related to parties or countries (particularly Iran, Cuba and Sudan) that are restricted under US economic sanctions provisions, even if their activities may have appeared to be lawful at the time.  Such activities create risk when they have even a minimal nexus with the United States, including clearing financial transactions in US dollars, furnishing financial services through institutions in the United States, processing payments through foreign branches of US financial institutions, or knowingly relying on services provided by US persons anywhere in the world to facilitate, participate in, approve, or support restricted transactions.

Foreign persons providing a variety of financial services, including banking, money remittance, insurance, reinsurance, investment, foreign exchange, mortgages and secured transaction/letter of credit services, should recognize the inherent US enforcement risk in concealing or intentionally omitting identifying information from payment messages involving a sanctioned country, entity or person, when the transaction has some nexus to the United States or US persons (including US dollar exchange).  Deceptive activity also formed the basis for part of the recent settlement against Weatherford International Ltd. (see our advisory on Weatherford). [Emphasis added.]

To reiterate.  A “minimal nexus” with the US puts a foreign financial institution at risk when it deals with a sanctioned entity.

Here is an Economist piece on how the US uses merely touching a dollar as a basis for aggressive prosecution.  Here is the Telegraph screeching about how the US has extracted billions of dollars in settlements from British banks for engaging in transactions in dollars.

The basic issue is that any transactions done in US dollars, even between foreign entities, have a US bank involved at some point to process the dollar transactions.  You do a deal in dollars with a US-sanctioned entity, you are at huge risk of prosecution.

The implication is that even if Gunvor deals only with non-US banks, as long as it deals in dollars, if the firm becomes a sanctioned entity anyone who is on the other side of the dollar transaction is at risk.  FUD is most acute with any transaction that touches the dollar.  And you can’t engage in the international oil trade (or commodities trade generally) without dealing in dollars.

Second, a somewhat related issue. Let’s say that Törnqvist really did buy out Timchenko’s shares.  Let’s say he didn’t pay with a note.  Where can Timchenko stash the cash? Paying in Euros or CHF could perhaps avoid the problems discussed above, but even so, what western financial institution wants to take Timchenko’s money?  Even Sberbank might have some reservations.

Just landed at O’Hare on my way back from Brussels and Geneva.  Right before taking off I saw that Gunvor’s bond price tanked at the open.  It closed yesterday yielding 10.9 percent, and spiked at the open to 13 percent.  I understand it is still tanked.

In other words, the market either totally disbelieves the story that Timchenko sold out, or thinks that the sale is irrelevant in determining the company’s vulnerability to sanctions or investigation.

My suspicion is the latter, because of the Treasury’s deviously, devilishly clever strategy.  Recall that UST said that Putin is a part owner of Gunvor.  No hedging about that claim, no “may be a part owner”:  a flat statement that Putin is an investor.  It said that Putin might have access to Gunvor funds.

So regardless of whether Timchenko sold, or commits ritual public suicide tomorrow, Treasury has put the Mark of Cain on the company.  Every counterparty, every lender has to have serious, serious concerns that the company may be sanctioned due to the Putin connection.

The tanking bond price makes it clear that the credit markets have serious doubts about the company’s survival prospects.  No doubt this reflects bankers’ serious reluctance to continue to finance a company that the US government has publicly tied to Putin.

Yes, most of Gunvor’s lenders are European banks, but ask Swiss banks about the joy of taking on the US government when it has an important policy objective in mind.  And think of all the leverage the US has over European banks given the myriad ongoing investigations of Libor, FX, ISDA Fix, and on and on.   Even if the Euros don’t sanction Timchenko (or Gunvor) (and they abstained from doing so today, waiting to announce that until I’d left Brussels, the cowards), the US has plenty of leverage over European banks.

The company has the weekend to try to turn things around.  But that Treasury statement casts a huge shadow.   In the current environment, bankers are afraid of their own shadows, let alone the shadow of a US government with blood in its eyes.

Press coverage of this story has been credulous, especially in the FT.  The stories have uncritically repeated Gunvor’s statements that Timchenko sold at fair value, and that there is no option for Timchenko to repurchase.  But they would say that, wouldn’t they?  And the stories don’t point out that the bond market is basically calling BS on Gunvor.

Speaking of fair value, I know Torbjörn Törnqvist is not an idiot.  He can go through the game tree, and realize that there is large probability that his shares, and the ones he purchased from Timchenko, will be worthless.  Meaning that he won’t have paid Timchenko book value, or anything even close.

Which raises the interesting question: if Timchenko is really just a front man for Putin, as the US government asserts, any big discount comes right out of Putin’s pocket.

Which is pretty much the point, isn’t it?  That’s exactly why UST’s statement is a big flashing neon light arrow pointing right at Putin.

@libertylynx reminded me of one of the whoppers that went unnoticed because of all the even bigger whoppers in Putin’s presser 10 days back:

Now, the stock market. As you may know, the stock market was jumpy even before the situation in Ukraine deteriorated. This is primarily linked to the policy of the US Federal Reserve, whose recent decisions enhanced the attractiveness of investing in the US economy and investors began moving their funds from the developing markets to the American market. This is a general trend and it has nothing to do with Ukraine. I believe it was India that suffered most, as well as the other BRICS states. Russia was hit as well, not as hard as India, but it was. This is the fundamental reason.

Some simple facts.  Since the beginning of March, the Russian market is down 13.74 percent.  The largest decline, of over 10 percent, occurred on the Monday after the upper chamber of the Duma authorized an invasion of Ukraine.  In the same time, the MSCI Emerging Market Index was down 2.55 percent: since Russia is included, non-Russian EM stocks were down less than 2.55 percent.  The MSCI EM Index also includes Turkey, which is lurching into chaos. As for India, it is up about 6 percent, and was down less than 1 percent on the day the Russian market crashed 10 percent.

So who you gonna believe?  VVP or those lying charts? Obviously what has hit the Russian markets is not a Fed-driven phenomenon common to BRICs or emerging markets.  This was a Russia-specific phenomenon.  Which means it’s all about Putin and Ukraine.

But the most revealing thing is that Putin can say such readily falsified things with such confidence and panache.  Has he convinced himself it’s true?  Or does he know that his real target audiences, Russians dependent on TV for news, and useful idiots in the West, will just swallow his swill as Gospel and won’t bother to check?

I’m guessing the latter, but I can’t rule out the former.