Looks like the ES has finished its mission for the final 5th wave of this round in the morning. It will be interesting to see how the cash index goes. If spy retraces from here and then bounces prior to reach yesterday's low, there will be more upside before any meaningful retrace.

short term market update for sept 14

update of the current market.

An alt is, we might just start the v wave and will make new high in days.

Stock Traders Find Speed Pays, in Milliseconds

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By CHARLES DUHIGG

Published: July 23, 2009

It is the hot new thing on Wall Street, a way for a handful of traders to master the stock market, peek at investors’ orders and, critics say, even subtly manipulate share prices.

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The Thirty-Millisecond Advantage

Today's Business: Charles Duhigg on Trading Strategies

It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets.

Powerful computers, some housed right next to the machines that drive marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange, enable high-frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed and, their detractors contend, reap billions at everyone else’s expense.

These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike. And after growing in the shadows for years, they are generating lots of talk.

Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.

And when a former Goldman Sachs programmer was accused this month of stealing secret computer codes — software that a federal prosecutor said could “manipulate markets in unfair ways” — it only added to the mystery. Goldman acknowledges that it profits from high-frequency trading, but disputes that it has an unfair advantage.

Yet high-frequency specialists clearly have an edge over typical traders, let alone ordinary investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission says it is examining certain aspects of the strategy.

“This is where all the money is getting made,” said William H. Donaldson, former chairman and chief executive of the New York Stock Exchange and today an adviser to a big hedge fund. “If an individual investor doesn’t have the means to keep up, they’re at a huge disadvantage.”

For most of Wall Street’s history, stock trading was fairly straightforward: buyers and sellers gathered on exchange floors and dickered until they struck a deal. Then, in 1998, the Securities and Exchange Commission authorized electronic exchanges to compete with marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange. The intent was to open markets to anyone with a desktop computer and a fresh idea.

But as new marketplaces have emerged, PCs have been unable to compete with Wall Street’s computers. Powerful algorithms — “algos,” in industry parlance — execute millions of orders a second and scan dozens of public and private marketplaces simultaneously. They can spot trends before other investors can blink, changing orders and strategies within milliseconds.

High-frequency traders often confound other investors by issuing and then canceling orders almost simultaneously. Loopholes in market rules give high-speed investors an early glance at how others are trading. And their computers can essentially bully slower investors into giving up profits — and then disappear before anyone even knows they were there.

High-frequency traders also benefit from competition among the various exchanges, which pay small fees that are often collected by the biggest and most active traders — typically a quarter of a cent per share to whoever arrives first. Those small payments, spread over millions of shares, help high-speed investors profit simply by trading enormous numbers of shares, even if they buy or sell at a modest loss.

“It’s become a technological arms race, and what separates winners and losers is how fast they can move,” said Joseph M. Mecane of NYSE Euronext, which operates the New York Stock Exchange. “Markets need liquidity, and high-frequency traders provide opportunities for other investors to buy and sell.”

The rise of high-frequency trading helps explain why activity on the nation’s stock exchanges has exploded. Average daily volume has soared by 164 percent since 2005, according to data from NYSE. Although precise figures are elusive, stock exchanges say that a handful of high-frequency traders now account for a more than half of all trades. To understand this high-speed world, consider what happened when slow-moving traders went up against high-frequency robots earlier this month, and ended up handing spoils to lightning-fast computers.

It was July 15, and Intel, the computer chip giant, had reporting robust earnings the night before. Some investors, smelling opportunity, set out to buy shares in the semiconductor company Broadcom. (Their activities were described by an investor at a major Wall Street firm who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job.) The slower traders faced a quandary: If they sought to buy a large number of shares at once, they would tip their hand and risk driving up Broadcom’s price. So, as is often the case on Wall Street, they divided their orders into dozens of small batches, hoping to cover their tracks. One second after the market opened, shares of Broadcom started changing hands at $26.20.

The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

In less than half a second, high-frequency traders gained a valuable insight: the hunger for Broadcom was growing. Their computers began buying up Broadcom shares and then reselling them to the slower investors at higher prices. The overall price of Broadcom began to rise.

Soon, thousands of orders began flooding the markets as high-frequency software went into high gear. Automatic programs began issuing and canceling tiny orders within milliseconds to determine how much the slower traders were willing to pay. The high-frequency computers quickly determined that some investors’ upper limit was $26.40. The price shot to $26.39, and high-frequency programs began offering to sell hundreds of thousands of shares.

The result is that the slower-moving investors paid $1.4 million for about 56,000 shares, or $7,800 more than if they had been able to move as quickly as the high-frequency traders.

Multiply such trades across thousands of stocks a day, and the profits are substantial. High-frequency traders generated about $21 billion in profits last year, the Tabb Group, a research firm, estimates.

“You want to encourage innovation, and you want to reward companies that have invested in technology and ideas that make the markets more efficient,” said Andrew M. Brooks, head of United States equity trading at T. Rowe Price, a mutual fund and investment company that often competes with and uses high-frequency techniques. “But we’re moving toward a two-tiered marketplace of the high-frequency arbitrage guys, and everyone else. People want to know they have a legitimate shot at getting a fair deal. Otherwise, the markets lose their integrity.”

comparison the current rally with one happened on the tech buble.

Just want to share some of my thoughts with u. Read ur site everyday. thanks for your good work.

Part one

Where the market goes in the future will mostly depends on where the dollar goes and where the dollar goes will be determined by the policies made in DC. So the Capital Hill and the White house will dictate over any chart reading on the path of the market direction. I don't know how high or how low $spx will go in the next few months or next few years but I am pretty much sure about one thing that is if the current policies (both fiscal and monetary) are not the right cure the prices of all kind of assets will respond accordingly and the market forces eventually will push politicians and American people to make the right decisions no matter they like it or not.

The fundamental root cause of the current problem as we all agree is overspending in governmental. corporational and personal levels. The correct cure is to control spending within its means. The Consumer is doing it (by foreclosure, default on credit card debt and spending less while saving more) and corporations are doing it accordingly (by layoffs and cutting capital investment) but the government is doing the opposite due to political considerations. The market will respond to the government policies in different stages which could be treated as a scoreboard for the outcome between the forces of government and the forces of the market:

Stage 1. from Oct. 2008 to March 6 2009: The market forces won. Market's primary concern was deflation: therefore we saw equity , commodity drop sharply while bond and dollar rallied even though Fed injected tremendous amount of liquidity into the system and Government is bailing out everybody.

Stage 2: from march 6 to a near future (most likely to Sept. 2009): The Government wins. Market's primary concern is government spending when the financial system is seemingly stabilized ( which is not and we will see the financial system collapses again in stage three) therefore dollar weakened, bond yield jumped, equity rallied. Although the government policies win so far the market is giving warning signals to the government by testing the limit of how weak the dollar can go and how much weak dollar induced inflation the US economy can withstand. The yield of 10 year treasury note and crude oil will keep climb (my guess is 10 year yield around 5 to 5.5% and 30 year mortgage around 7.25 to 7.75%. as for oil little bit hard to project but it could go to 105 to 110 level) until the economy turns into a nose dive mood again. I don't know the exact time frame but I suspect b4 Labor Day we will see oil peaked by then and all the economic indicators pointing to deteriozation in a fast pace.

Stage 3: market forces win again. $SPX down another 50% or so from its peak in stage 2 (probably around 1050 as its peak). Commodities tank again. Dollar and bond rally again. Unemployment rise above 12% and heading to 15%. The second wave of foreclosures(mostly prime loans) and credit card defaults and commercial real estate defaults will hit the banks harder once again. Now what the government will do will once again determines the outcome of next stage.

If by this time the government could adopt the correct policies and let those should fail fail then the healing process will start from here and we will see a start of a bull market pretty soon or at least the market low reached in this stage will be the LOW.

If the government instead does not learn the lessons and increase the magnitude of the wrong polices implemented in the stage 2 (more spending and more bailout), we will see a repeat of stage 2 with hyperinflation this time. The dollar could lose its reserve status and there will be large scale social and political unrests until American people really wake up and decide to take bitter medicines that they should take at the first place. I was so mad at the politicians at DC and their stupid policies that I was too biased to think the American Century is gone and this country will end up falling apart. However I strongly believe we human beings are able to learn from our own mistakes and are adaptive to the new challenges. The American people may not be able to convince themselves now that less government spending and live a simpler life is the best solution but they will realize they have to to do so when they see otherwise their country will be falling apart and they will have no life instead of a simpler life. The market dynamics will force American people to adopt the correct policies in the end and will rebuild the great American experience. It's just too sad to foresee the Americans could go through this tough period with less cost and pain instead the luck of the will of both its citizen and their leaders will cause them to go through much bigger ordeal.

Watch California. What happens in California will indicate what will happen to the whole country.

For short term, just watch dollar, bond yields, commodities and be ready to short the stocks.

Just remember there is no green shoots. Also remember the run on oil, bond yields and commodities will not be sustainable because their own rise will lead to their own free fall. They are used as a pressure by the market dynamics to force government to revert back to correct policy making. Buy them when government issues wrong policies and sell them when the bad outcomes from these policies become obvious to everybody.

I believe a large part of the slopers will share the same view as I described above and hope this could make you feel better about the big picture and will not be confused or frustrated by the daily market fluctuations.

frank zhao

JUNE 14, 2009 1:58 PM

Next Monday:
gld-->spx down
TLT-->spx down
USD-->spx up
cpce-->spx up
vix-->spx up
TNX-->spx up