We got the idea after realizing, in face to face meetings with them [the CFTC], they didn’t understand market structure or the importance of latency and the consolidated feed. That was several years ago. We still aren’t sure if they get it, or are just playing dumb.
The bottom box (SIP) shows the National Best Bid and Offer. Watch how much it changes in the blink of an eye.
Watch High-Frequency Traders (HFT) at the millisecond level jam thousands of quotes in the stock of Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) through our financial networks on May 2, 2013. Video shows 1/2 second of time. If any of the connections are not running perfectly, High Frequency Traders can profit from the price discrepancies that result. There is no economic justification for this abusive behavior.
Each box represents one exchange. The SIP (CQS in this case) is the box at 6 o’clock. It shows the National Best Bid/Offer. Watch how much it changes in a fraction of a second. The shapes represent quote changes which are the result of a change to the top of the book at each exchange. The time at the bottom of the screen is Eastern Time HH:MM:SS:mmm (mmm = millisecond). We slow time down so you can see what goes on at the millisecond level. A millisecond (ms) is 1/1000th of a second.
Note how every exchange must process every quote from the others — for proper trade through price protection. This complex web of technology must run flawlessly every millisecond of the trading day, or arbitrage (HFT profit) opportunities will appear. It is easy for HFTs to cause delays in one or more of the connections between each exchange.
Nanex: visualizing zillions of trades in a half-second
By way of Naked Capitalism, I learned of the video below produced by Nanex, the market data analysis company in Chicago. It runs for just under 6 minutes and shows all the quotes for Johnson & Johnson stock racing among a network of exchanges over just one half second of real time. Watch the whole thing and then remember -- this is just one half second (the clock, bottom middle, goes up in increments of milliseconds). Below the video, some explanation of what you're seeing from Nanex.
MAJOR BREAKDOWN IN THE DOLLAR
Major break in the dollar index today is signalling 15-20 weeks of declines ahead. This should be the fuel to drive gold back to test the old highs by early this fall.
The invisible hand made visible
My latest Bloomberg column just appeared (or will around 6pm EST today). It takes a look at a landmark economics paper from just over ten years ago, one that I am sure (or at least hope) every macroeconomist, indeed every economist, knows fairly well. Given it's fundamental importance, I'm guessing it is by now probably a staple of undergraduate economics education. I'm referring of course to this study by Robert Clower and Peter Howitt which, in comparison with traditional economic theories, took a major step in actually revealing the mechanisms by which Adam Smith's Invisible Hand might work.
To many economists, this probably sounds crazy. What about Arrow-Debreu and all the thousands of later papers in general equilibrium theory in the same tradition? Don't those all establish how a decentralized market can act to organize economic activity in a remarkably efficient way? We'll, actually, no -- because only a very small fraction of those studies have even tried to model the messy dynamic process by which a huge number of independent people might, through trial and error, through learning, come to lead the market to its final organized state. And NONE, so far as I am aware, established by investigation a plausible dynamical story consistent with realistic human behavior. Hence, the nice story and metaphor of the Invisible Hand really has no plausible counterpart in standard economic theory; it remains no more than a metaphor, even if economists seem loathe to admit that.
But this isn't to say that something like the Invisible Hand idea isn't true and really interesting. The insight inspiring (the late) Clower and Howitt is that human economies probably self-organize into functional states coordinating the disparate activities of many individuals in much the same way ant colonies organize themselves. It's not due to the far-sighted rationality of any one agent (ant or person), but due instead to organizing structures that emerge to help us relatively unintelligent individuals cope with a very complex world. In the words of Howitt from this nice paper from 2007:
The idea motivating the approach is that complex systems, like economies or anthills, can exhibit behavioral patterns beyond what any of the individual agents in the system can comprehend. So instead of modelling the system as if everyone’s actions and beliefs were coordinated in advance with everyone else’s, as in rational expectations theory, the approach assumes simple behavioral rules and allows a coordinated equilibrium to be a possibly emergent property of the system itself. The approach is used to explain system behavior by “growing” it in the computer. Once one has devised a computer program that mimics the desired characteristics of the system in question one can then use the program as a “culture dish” in which to perform experiments.What Clower and Howitt showed in their 2000 paper -- and Howitt has expanded upon since in work with other economists -- is that autonomous agents of limited intelligence working on their own in an economic setting can readily self organize their activities into a functioning system with an intelligence far beyond their own. In their model, the coordinating infrastructure is a network of firms that emerges to make it easier for people to find the goods they need, vastly simplifying the problem of matching producers and consumers. I won't spoil the story. See some of Howitt and his colleagues' most recent papers, such as this one, for a nice summary of the original model and developments since then.
Now the first reaction of many economists upon first hearing about this methodology is that all economic models with an explicit micro-foundation, which is to say almost all models that one sees in mainstream macroeconomic theory, are “agent-based”. Some even have a multitude of heterogeneous agents (see Krusell and Smith, 1998 and Krebs, 2003, among others). So what’s the big deal?
The big deal, as Tesfatsion has emphasized on many occasions, has to do with autonomy. An agent in a rational-expectations-equilibrium model has a behavioral rule that is not independent of what everyone else is doing. In any given situation, her actions will depend on some key variables (prices, availability of job offers, etc.) or the rational expectation thereof, that are endogenous to the economic system. These variables will change when we change the agent’s environment, and hence her behavior cannot be specified independently of the others’. The household, for example, in a market-clearing model of supply and demand cannot choose what quantity to demand until told what price will clear the market. Likewise the agent on a Lucas island (a Phelps Island with rational expectors) cannot choose how much to sell until informed of the stochastic process determining aggregate and relative demand fluctuations.
The problem with assuming non-autonomous agents is that it leaves the model incomplete, and in a way that precludes a deep analysis of the coordination problem. For if the model does not allow people to act without knowing the equilibrium value of some variable, then someone must have computed that equilibrium value a priori. In such a model there is no way to describe out-of-equilibrium behavior, and the problem of reconciling peoples’ independently conceived plans is assumed to be solved by some unspecified mechanism that uses no scarce resources...
Now under certain assumptions about common information, someone endowed with enough information could figure out on her own what the market-clearing price is going to be, or what the rational expectation of the price level is, and in this sense could act autonomously even in a rational-expectations equilibrium framework. But an economy full of agents that were autonomous in this sense would not be decentralized in the Hayekian sense, because no market would be needed to aggregate the diverse information of heterogeneous people, each of whom can do the aggregation in her head. Each would be capable of acting as the economy’s central planner, although in this case the planner would not be needed. Moreover, such an economy would have no need for macroeconomists, because everyone would already know as much as could be known about the macroeconomy. The coordination problem would be trivial. So by “autonomous” agents I mean agents that are endowed with behavioral rules that can tell them what to do in any given situation, independently of each others’ rules, even when no one has access to a correct model of the economy.
One of the most important things emerging from this work, in my opinion, is a way to look at the mechanisms behind economic coordination in a much more specific way. When an economy gets hit by a crisis and goes into recession, things happen which cannot easily be reversed, and certainly not instantaneously. Firms go out of business and then do not exist. This leaves gaps in the coordinating network which puts additional stress on other firms or individuals. An economy, like a broken bone, has suffered real damage that requires both time and the consumption of resources to overcome. Of course, you cannot even begin to understand how the key coordinating infrastructure can be damaged, or how it might be repaired, if you have no theoretical apparatus to describe that coordinating structure in the first place -- this is the position of modern mainstream (neo-classical) economics.
Hence, it's important to remember when confronting the rhetorical arguments of the OpEd pages -- for or against "austerity" or "fiscal stimulus" or some other policy -- that the economist you are reading has either based his or her views on a theoretical model that doesn't even try to model the key mechanisms of self-organizing coordination, or has come to a belief for other reasons, perhaps (in the best cases) a deep reading of history. There are other possibilities, of course.
I must say, this whole thing seems amazing to me. I would have thought that Clower's and Howitt's lead would have immediately been picked up by any macroeconomist eager to make progress. It would have swept in a new approach to understanding macroeconomic dynamics, displacing the older approaches; after all, it actually describes how the Invisible Hand works, whereas they do not. Obviously, this hasn't been the case, which in itself says something disturbing about the state of today's economics. It's clearly not all about seeking a better understanding.
REGRESSION TO THE MEAN
There’s a reason why commercial traders are regression to the mean traders. In this business it is the one thing that you can absolutely bank on. It's like death and taxes, it never fails. All markets eventually return to the mean. An appropriate corollary to this rule is that the further an asset gets stretched above or below the mean the more violent the regression is, and the further it will move past the mean during the snapback.
You can see this clearly in the chart below.
Notice that during the bull market from 2002 -2007 the S&P never stretched extremely far above the 200 day moving average (well until the final euphoria phase in 2007). Consequently each intermediate correction halted at or slightly below the 200 day moving average.
This changed when the new cyclical bull market started in 2009. It changed because the markets were not allowed to trade naturally. They were warped by massive doses of quantitative easing. This caused markets to stretch much further above the 200 day moving average than would have occurred normally. The consequences of course were that when the corrections hit they unwound violently and moved much further below the 200 DMA than would have occurred naturally.
This bull market is much more volatile than the previous one because the market is being driven by currency debasement instead of true economic expansion.
Now we are in a situation where the stock market has been stretched ridiculously far above the mean by QE 3 & 4. Trust me, Bernanke has not abolished the forces of regression to the mean. All he has done is guarantee that the regression is going to be many multiples more violent than it should have been.
When this house of cards topples over, I think there is a pretty good chance it’s going to be even more severe than what happened in 2011.
Also notice the red arrows marking major cyclical bull and bear market turning points. Notice the Fed warped the last cyclical bull market much higher and longer in duration than should have occurred naturally (he turned a 4 year cycle into a 6 1/2 year cycle). Consequently the forces of regression responded by triggering the second worst bear market in history. The current cyclical bull market, although not stretched as long in time, is extremely stretched in magnitude so the resulting bear market will almost certainly be exceptionally violent and protracted.
Mean regression rule: Without fail liquidity eventually finds it's way into undervalued assets. An appropriate corollary to that rule would be that liquidity will eventually find it's way out of overvalued assets.
Unless Bernanke has found a way to break the natural law of regression to the mean (he hasn't) then at some point we are going to see liquidity flee the overvalued stock market. When it does it's going to look for undervalued assets to land on. Nothing is more undervalued in my opinion than commodities in general, and precious metals in particular.
Regression to the mean doesn't just apply to assets stretched to the upside. It also acts to levitate extremely depressed assets, and the same rules apply. The further an asset is stretched below the mean the more violently the regression usually is once the selling exhausts. Considering that gold is now stretched about as far below the 200 day moving average as it was in 2008 the rally when it arrives should be every bit as powerful if not more so than we saw in 2009.
In my opinion we now have the setup to drive either another C-wave as large or larger than the one out of the 2008 bottom, or this is the set up to drive the bubble phase of the bull market.
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