New York – Big bets by a single trader on Chicago’s derivatives exchange could be key to Thursday’s so-called “flash crash” on Wall Street, in which the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average fleetingly dropped by almost 1,000 points.
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Regulators are examining the actions of an individual who executed a rapid series of hefty, bearish trades over a 19-minute period on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The unnamed trader amounted to 9% of volume on the Standard & Poor’s e-mini futures contract, which is the largest futures account tracking US stock prices.
Gary Gensler, head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told Congress that the trader entered the market at 2.32pm on Thursday and stopped trading at 2.51pm – the very period when the Dow plummeted by a record-breaking 998.5 points, before quickly recovering ground. At the time, there were 250 traders dealing in the S&P e-mini contract. But while others were both buying and selling, the trader in question simply sold: “The trader sold on the way down and continued to do so even as the price recovered.”
The size of the individual’s trades was not unprecedented. But technical factors are thought to have aggravated the sell-off as “circuit breakers” intended to slow trading, worsened liquidity.
Why did he sell on the way down
The missing piece in this whole story is that this trader was NOT making “bets” on the S&P. He was selling futures as a hedge against positions that he owned. This is a normal business practice and trading strategy.
Is he not allowed to sell when he wants?
this is ridiculous. the true cause of the flash crash was the lack of liquidity due to the algos and other electronic trading machines shutting off and entering safe mode. the bid wasnt there to his some market orders and they got filled at extremely low prices. this further removed the machines from the systems and further reduced the bids until the remaining machines filled the market sell orders at a penny for lack of other buyers. there is no one futures trader that caused this. especially if he was trading normal volumes.
To #1 , I can not be sure, however, perhaps he sold on the way down because he was going short, so this trader ‘pressed his bet” that the markets would go down. He wanted the momentum to continue downward.
the missing part of this article is this trader’s name.
his name is NASSIM TALABI
The Obama Administration is hiding the fact that we were once again attacked during his [LAX] watch!
The cause of the sudden volatility was CYBER TERRORISM!
His name is Nassim Nicholas Taleb, actually. Not Talabi. He’s the author of “The Black Swan” which is an amazing read about randomness and finance, if anyone is interested.
The man in question was Nassim Taleb:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704879704575236771699461084.html?mod=WSJ_business_whatsNews
I bet that tomorrow between 2-3 pm volume will dry up completely .
bottom line, did he make or loose $?
The entire Congress have no clue as to what transpired ! here is what happenned
To answer this occurrence only two questions must be answered:
1. How did so mnay stocks trade from mid 40’s or 30’s trade next at Zero! Yes zero!!!
2. How many shares trade in 6 minutes of a 600 point dropp and equal time in a reversal??
the answer most of the politicians are yutzes!
1. 50-75% of all institutional orders (not flash traders Major investors) are executed by alogrithmic modeling (computer decision making only)
2. The elctronic exchanges are all illiquid and orders have no lower bids except as entered by computer models.
3. When the the market lost 350 points a mini ETF trader entered sell orders which have
underlying stks that have to be sold.
4. As many models are constructed by similar mathematical formulas most bids were canceled. So when these mkt orders hit the various electronic exchanges the only bids were one penny or zero.
In conclusion, 80% of all trading on exchanges is done by institutions who mostly have mathematical modeling and that caused the glitch..
The Fix-when mkt drops by a certain percentage only limit oreders with collars like 10% of last sale.