Free Republic

His only qualification was giving lots of money to the Clinton Foundation A few weeks ago, ABC broke the story of Raj Fernando, a big-money donor to the Clinton Foundation - as well as past campaigns of both Obama and Hillary - and how he managed to land a spot on the prestigious International Security Advisory Board. That’s a board generally populated by former generals, governors and top diplomats, who advise the Secretary of State on international security matters. Lots of eyebrows were raised when a securities trader with no background in any of this was introduced as a new...

A single algorithm which placed and then cancelled orders on the Nasdaq accounted for 4% of all quoted traffic in the US with no clear goal. An investor gives FRANCE 24 his insight into the mystery which has concerned market watchers. A single mammoth mystery algorithm has set alarm bells ringing for market regulators and players, and underlined the market’s vulnerability to technology and the woeful lack of regulation on algorithms. A single algorithm last week placed and cancelled orders on the Nasdaq accounting for 4% of all quoted traffic in the US. Not only this, it also accounted for...

ABC Breaking News Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later. Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens...

Newly released State Department emails help reveal how a major Clinton Foundation donor was placed on a sensitive government intelligence advisory board even though he had no obvious experience in the field, a decision that appeared to baffle the department’s professional staff. The emails further reveal how, after inquiries from ABC News, the Clinton staff sought to “protect the name” of the Secretary, “stall” the ABC News reporter and ultimately accept the resignation of the donor just two days later. Copies of dozens of internal emails were provided to ABC News by the conservative political group Citizens United, which obtained...

There is a stark contrast between the PBOC and the US Federal Reserve’s approach to managing markets. The Fed tends to treat investors like the recently burgled: reassurance at every stage, no loud noises during the night. American central bankers have been signalling for two years that the crisis-era programme of vacuuming up bonds from the market, known as quantitative easing, would be wound up as the economy improved. ... China’s abrupt interventions have therefore come as a surprise to investors who have only recently gained direct access to the country’s A-share market. By Friday night, after five days of...

Silicon Graphics has a need for speed. Or, more precisely, some of its customers do, and those customers also have money to burn. Supercomputer maker Appro International launched its HF1 overclocked server for hedge funds and other financial firms back in October, and now SGI is jumping into the game with a special Rackable half-depth rack server that has overclocked processors. For a lot of workloads, particularly with financial trading, the aggregate capacity of a multi-core processor is not nearly as important as the clock speed. With clock speeds in the x64 world more or less stuck at about 3...

How HFT Quote Stuffing Caused The Market Crash Of May 6, And Threatens To Destroy The Entire Market At Any Moment Submitted by Tyler Durden on 06/23/2010 16:16 -0500 Even as the idiots at the SEC mope about cluelessly, confirming they deserve not one cent of taxpayer money to fund their massively overbloated budget, and should all be summarily fired to collect tarballs in the Gulf of Mexico (and soon Maine), our friends at Nanex have conducted an exhaustive analysis (must read for everybody concerned about market structure), in which they identify the various parties responsible for the market crash,...

The NY Times has blown the cover off the dark art known as "HFT", or "High-Frequency Trading", perhaps without knowing it.

Federal investigators probing the “flash crash” that briefly sliced nearly 1,000 points off the Dow Thursday are zeroing in on a series of “unusually high-volume” trades in S&P futures that originated in Chicago, a government official told POLITICO. Those trades set off a chain reaction of trades that caused the biggest drop within a single day in the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s storied history.

Goldman Sachs Defends Dark Pools, Short Selling By JOAN E. SOLSMAN Goldman Sachs Group Inc. defended a range of trading practices currently under regulatory scrutiny, including dark pools and short selling, in a report to the Securities and Exchange Commission and a series of posting on its Web site. In defending dark pools, private venues where large blocks of securities are traded anonymously, Goldman said they are simply the result of technology improving on the kind of non-displayed liquidity that has always existed in the market. The firm, which has reaped huge trading profits in the last two quarters, said...