I took a screenshot yesterday at 2:22pm, on Feb 22, 2022.
Sign from God? Turning point? Hogwash?
Those are better than most proffered reasons for the stock market’s moves.
Lately it’s been delivering pain. Blame goes to Ukraine, where the Gross Domestic Product of about $155 billion is 40% of Apple’s 2021 revenue. Way under Denver’s $200 billion GDP. A tenth of Russia’s.
Illustration 45324873 © Iqoncept | Dreamstime.com
Ukraine is not destabilizing global stocks. Numbers help us understand things. The numbers don’t add up, without offense, for Ukraine.
So, why are stocks falling? Answering why is like explaining what causes earthquakes: We understand they’re products of mathematical facts insinuated into our dirt.
Well, mathematical facts shape equity markets too, and the construction emanates from the USA and its 40% share of the total global equity market.
Anybody remember the Flash Crash? Flash orders? Books were written. Investigations convened. Congressional hearings held. MSM’s good friend Joe Saluzzi was on CBS 60 Minutes describing how the stock market works.
We seem to have forgotten.
Now the Department of Justice is probing short-selling. The SEC is investigating block trades.
For God’s sake.
The block market that should be investigated is the off-market one where Exchange Traded Funds are created in huge, swapped block trades of stock without competition, taxes, or commissions. The SEC is fine with that. Approved it.
The short-selling needing investigating is the market-maker exemption from short-locate rules that powers the stock market. Academic studies claiming clouds of short-selling around big declines lack comprehension of how the stock market works.
The SEC knows how it works. I doubt the DOJ does.
Everybody wants to find that volatility springs from nefarious intent. Greedy people. Cheats.
No, it’s the rules. The SEC publishes data on cancelled trades – legal spoofing. That’s the MIDAS system, built for the SEC by a high-frequency trader.
People have gone to jail for what’s a fundamental fact of market function. The truth is, most orders are cancelled. How can you parse what’s legal or not when the market is stuffed with behaviors that if separated by label or exemption move from illegal to legal?
Something should be wrong, or not. Don’t lie. Don’t steal. Don’t cheat. The Ten Commandments are simple.
When you say, “Don’t cheat – unless you’re a market-maker,” your stock market is already a disaster in the making. People won’t understand why prices go up or down.
Here’s some math. The average trade-size in the stock market – shares trading hands at a time – is down more than 50% since 2016. It dropped 10% just in the past 200 days in the S&P 500.
The average S&P 500 stock trades 100 shares at a time, data ModernIR tracks show. That’s exactly the regulatory minimum for quoting a bid or offer.
Meanwhile, the number of trades daily is up more than 20% from a 200-day average of 40,000 trades daily per S&P 500 component to nearly 50,000 in the last five trading days.
Oh, and roughly 48% of all stock volume the last five days was SHORT (vs about 45% 200-day average).
And the DOJ is investigating short-selling.
Combine stocks and ETFs and 90% of trades are cancelled. Over 90% of all short-selling is sanctioned, exempted market-making – firms making stock up out of thin air to keep all those 100-share trades happening.
The DOJ is searching for a private-sector speck while a beam protrudes from the all-seeing government eye.
Do we want a stock market that gives you 100 shares that might not exist? Or a stock market that reflects reality? People don’t even know. You can’t have both. The SEC simply hasn’t explained to anybody this Hobson’s Choice.
The principal stock buyers and sellers embed their computers in every tradable market on the planet, and all the machines share instant information. They’re 50% of volume. That’s why equities rise and fall in relative global uniformity (not perfectly – there are always asymmetries to exploit).
Machines identify breakdowns in supply and demand and magnify them. Stock exchange IEX made famous by Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys calls it “crumbling quotes.” The stock market becomes like California cliffsides. It…dissolves.
Investigations are wasted time. Constant scrutiny of headlines and fundamentals for meaning behind the market’s moves is mostly pointless.
I’m not saying nothing matters. But the central tendency, the principal answer, is market structure.
I could also say math signals gains next, and also says stocks are down because momentum died in Jun/Jul 2021. Another story.
There’s just one thing wrong with the stock market. Its singular purpose is the perpetuation of continuous activity. When activity hiccups, the market crumbles like a California cliffside.
The rest is confusing busy with productive.
And that’s why if you’re a trader or public company in the stock market, and you don’t spend SOME time understanding how it works, you’re on that cliffside.
