Troubling Trades Found Ahead of Flash Crash
September 27, 2010
Graham Bowley, a DealBook colleague, reports:
The Chicago data firm that first identified strange patterns — dubbed
“crop circles” — in stock market data around
the flash crash on May 6 has put together
a new analysis that it says backs the theory that one or more trading firms was intentionally trying to flood exchanges with orders.
The firm,
Nanex, hopes the
Securities and Exchange Commission and the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission will be able to address its analysis in their long-awaited report on the flash crash due to be published before the end of this month.
Eric Scott Hunsader, the founder of Nanex, said the regulators must at least explain why investors and other market participants should not be worried by what it found to be a sharp acceleration in the frequency of orders being sent to exchanges that preceded the plunge in the stock market on May 6.
“They need to address this because if they don’t, the market will address it,” he said, suggesting that confidence in the integrity of the market could be undermined.
In
an interview last week with The New York Times, Gregg E. Berman, the S.E.C. official leading its investigation into the cause of the crash, said he had found no evidence of any intention to disrupt markets on May 6.
Mr. Hunsader said the sharp increase in order frequency, caused by computerized traders shooting rapid-fire buy and sell orders to exchanges, was a trend that had become even more pronounced since May. In some instances, order frequency had risen to as much as 15,000 orders a second in some stocks, he said.
In the new analysis, Nanex says it has identified a crucial one-second period around 14:42 on the afternoon of May 6 just before stocks started to fall. During this period, buy and sell orders shot up markedly.
It says it has also discovered a similar pattern occurring a week earlier on April 28.
Nanex says that so far the immediate causes of the crash seem to be a sale of about $125 million of the most actively traded stock-index derivative contract, known as the 500 e-mini futures contract, on the
Chicago Mercantile Exchange followed a fraction of a second later by a big sale of exchange-traded funds on other exchanges. Shortly after these events, the broader stock market went into a free fall.
“In our opinion, the event that sparked the rapid sell-off at 14:42:44:075 was an immediate sale of approximately $125 million worth of June 2010 CME eMini futures contracts followed 25ms later by the immediate sale of over $100 Million worth of the top ETF’s.”
But Nanex says that it has now also identified a surge in buy and sell orders that preceded these sales and that this surge may provide the ultimate explanation for the sharp drop in the stock market.
“Approximately 400ms before the eMini sale, the quote traffic rate for all NYSE, NYSE Arca, and Nasdaq stocks surged to saturation levels within 75ms. This is a new and surprising discovery.”
This surge in orders may not have been intended to cause the general market rout. Instead, it may have been intended simply to slow down some markets so that traders could profit by arbitrage with other exchanges, Mr. Hunsader said.
Go to Flash Crash Analysis from Nanex »
Go to Related Article from The New York Times »
Go to Related Article from The New York Times »
Troubling Trades Found Ahead of Flash Crash - NYTimes.com