Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The Real Deal - Greek financial crisis

From: PressTVGlobalNews  | Sep 19, 2011

 

Keiser Report: Dollar-Trapped

By on Sep 20, 2011

This week Max Keiser and co-host, Stacy Herbert, discuss Babyface Bernanke, Eurotarp and 'rogue traders.' In the second half of the show Max talks to Bill Still, director of The Money Masters & The Secret of Oz, about Fort Knox, state banks and monetary reform.

Repeat after me: Market Manipulation via High Frequency Trading is a Conspiracy Theory

 Remember Market Makers are only there to provide "liquidity" out of their public service commitment to orderly markets, never to front run slower players that are a nanosecond behind the game. Emphasis in the following article is mine.

The best quote I have come across on this subject is: 

"In the race to Zero, a nanosecond is often the difference between profiting from liquidity
or watching your competitors do it" ~ Larry Tabb

From Securities Technology Monitor:

The firm, Burstream, said it can process a new piece of data in 600 billionths of a second, regardless of how many millions of pieces of data stock markets in the United States are generating.

The transmission of market data messages hit a new peak of 6.1 million messages a second on September 12, according to MarketDataPeaks.com, operated by Exegy. Exegy is a supplier of market data appliances.
Burstream Monday is announcing that its NanoSpeed Market Data Mesh service is being installed at the Nasdaq OMX market center in Carteret, N.J. That is in a data facility owned and managed by Verizon Communications.

Nasdaq members get “a substantial trading advantage – ten times faster than hardware-accelerated approaches,” states Paul Barringer, CEO of Burstream. “Our NanoSpeed MeshTM gives proprietary trading firms the ability to quickly and dramatically increase the performance of their latency-sensitive algorithms.’’

The Nanospeed system also streamlines processing by normalizing all incoming market data, so that it can be managed in one steady stream. The data also is kept in active memory, so processing can be instant. Beyond that, a trading firm’s entire order book at a given moment is held in active memory, so it can be acted on immediately.

In addition, Burstream acts almost as a co-location provider. Burstream will maintain trading servers in the Carteret facility, near Nasdaq’s order matching engines.


“Making the jump from microseconds to nanoseconds will ratchet up the competition and could be a game changer for latency-sensitive strategies and certain trading houses,’’ said Larry Tabb, founder of the Tabb Group.........read in full


Manoj Narang on High Frequency Trading

 

Italy debt rating downgraded by S&P

From Al Jarzeera:

Standard & Poor's has downgraded Italy's sovereign debt rating, citing economic, fiscal and political weaknesses in the eurozone's third-largest economy.

The rating agency said on Monday that it had downgraded Italian debt to "A/A-1" from a "A+/A-1+" grade because of "Italy's weakening economic growth prospects."

It said Italy's weak governing coalition would "limit the government's ability to respond decisively" to events.

"We believe the reduced pace of Italy's economic activity to date will make the government's revised fiscal targets difficult to achieve," S&P said in a statement.

Low labour participation rates, an inefficient public sector and modest foreign investment flows were cited as key drags on growth.

"In our view, the authorities remain reluctant to tackle these issues," the agency said.

S&P's rival rating agency Moody's has already indicated it is weighing its rating for Italy, which is currently at Aa2, two notches below Moody's top triple-A rating.

Eric Sprott and the case for $1200 Silver

From Saturday, September 10, 2011.  Eric Sprott and Eric King discuss the silver market and the case for $1200......listen here

Tony Blair 'visited Libya to lobby for JP Morgan'

From the UK Telegraph:

A senior executive with the Libyan Investment Authority, the $70 billion fund used to invest the country's oil money abroad, said Mr Blair was one of three prominent western businessmen who regularly dealt with Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the former leader.

Saif al-Islam and his close aides oversaw the activities of the fund, and often directed its officials on where they should make its investments, he said.

The executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials were told the "ideas" they were ordered to pursue came from Mr Blair as well as one other British businessman and a former American diplomat.

"Tony Blair's visits were purely lobby visits for banking deals with JP Morgan," he said.

He said that unlike some other deals - notably some investments run by the US bank Goldman Sachs - JP Morgan's had never turned "bad"......read on

Short the Aussie Dollar?

UBS Bonuses at Risk After $2.3B Trading Loss

From Bloomberg:

Bonuses at UBS AG (UBSN)’s investment bank may be at risk after the company suffered a $2.3 billion loss from what it described as unauthorized trading.

Switzerland’s largest bank said Sept. 15 that it may be unprofitable in the third quarter as a result of the loss, which exceeds the 1.21 billion Swiss francs ($1.4 billion) in pretax profit from the investment bank in the first half. The bank first estimated the loss at $2 billion, before raising it yesterday.
“A problem of this magnitude means they may be very strongly challenged to have any bonus pool at all,” said Steven Hall, managing director of Steven Hall & Partners, an executive compensation consulting firm based in New York. “It’s pretty clear there are going to be a lot of people who are not going to get bonuses.”.....read on

American Debt Crisis: After Hours

This is the epilogue to the post from Casey Research originally posted here