Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, the new book by Michael Lewis, focuses on market rigging by high frequency traders. In discussing that abomination, pundits are avoiding the issue.
In any market, transactions are drawn from
lists of buyers’ bids and sellers’ asking prices, and some individual or
process has to match up which two are going to execute the next trade. On the New York Stock Exchange that used to be a human, the
floor specialist. Today, he or (rarely)
she has been replaced by who knows what, and we’re told only that these are “computers”
and maybe “algorithms”, queued in ways that give advantages to racketeers, like
being in front of us and knowing the prices we're supposedly getting before our trades are posted.
Crime family racketeers. The same Presbyterian Mafioso who gave us The
World Financial Apocalypse of 2008, only the scam was bundling subprime
mortgages then, hoodwinking those of us dumb enough to buy their CDO’s
(collateralized debt obligations) and MBD’s (mortgage backed securities), and
now they’re robbing us through our orders.
All of our orders. Buy or sell stocks, bonds, futures, options,
exchange traded funds, index funds, or whatever else is out there, and Crime
Lords have their thugs lined up ahead of you in droves waiting to 1) buy your buy before you
and sell it to you at a higher price, 2) sell your sell order first and buy it
from you at a lower price, or 3) generally screw with you every which way they
want, and that brings up the real problem here.
Our hotshots at the Securities and
Excuses Commission. Talk about racketeering.
Again, for the umpteenth time, the pack
of them belong in the slammer. Nothing
happens on Wall Street without their total neglect, and then they take jobs with
the Families.
