Race Condition

You might think today’s title is about physical fitness.

No, ModernIR is an equity data analytics firm, not a personal trainer. I first heard the term “race conditions” used to describe stock-trading at TABB Forum, the traders’ community, in comments around an October 2012 article there by HFT expert Haim Bodek on why high-frequency traders have an advantage.

Reader Dave Cummings said, responding to it, “When Reg NMS was debated, several people very knowledgeable about market structure (including myself) argued against locked, crossed, and trade-through rules because of the side-effects caused by race conditions between fragmented markets.”

Emphasis mine. You say who is Dave Cummings and what is this jargon that has me wanting to bludgeon my noggin on a wall?

I hope Mr. Cummings won’t mind my resurrecting his point. He started both BATS Global Inc., the stock exchange the CBOE is buying that by market-share the last five trading days nosed out the NYSE with 20.7% of US volume versus the venerated Buttonwood bourse’s 19.9% (the Nasdaq had 17.7%, IEX 2.2%, and nearly 40% was in broker pools), and speedy proprietary (no customers, trades its own capital) firm TradeBot.

He knows market structure.

We come to the jargon. Don’t tune out, investor-relations people and investors, because you need to understand the market to function well in it. Right?

Most people don’t know what Dave knows (that could go on a T-shirt). Mr. Cummings was explaining that trading rules prohibit the bid to buy and the offer to sell from being the same. A locked market. Crossed markets are out too, by law. You can’t make a bid to buy that is higher than the offer to sell.

And this “trade through” thing means brokers can’t continue buying stock at $20 one place if it’s now available for $19.99 another place.

I’ve said before that there’s no such thing as a “fragmented market.” A market by definition is aggregation. The stock market today is a series of interconnected conclaves all forced to do the same thing with the same products and prices. You understand? You can buy Nasdaq stocks at the NYSE and vice versa and only at the best price everywhere.

ModernIR builds software and runs lots of data-warehousing functions so we know race conditions. It’s when something doesn’t happen in proper sequence, you might say.

For instance, a data warehouse must be updated on schedule before an algorithm processes a routine. Some hiccup in the network slows the population of the data warehouse, so the algorithm fails because data haven’t shown up. Race condition.

The stock market is similarly a series of dependent processes, some of which will inescapably fail. Why would we create a stock market with a known propensity for process errors? Exactly. But let’s focus on what this means to investors and public companies.

It means the market is barred from behaving rationally in some circumstances. What if I want to pay more for something? Or say I don’t mind getting an inferior price for the convenience of staying in one place.

Plus, can we trust prices? What if yesterday’s big gains were a product of a race condition? I’m not saying they were. But we measure discrete market behaviors setting prices. Counterparties for derivatives were heavy buyers Monday when the stock market swooned sharply and then recovered most of its losses by the close.

These big banks or insurers bought because investors had portfolio insurance to guard against losses. That’s not investment behavior.

What then if equity trades tied to derivatives didn’t populate someplace and the market zoomed yesterday on a process error? Again, I’m not saying it did. But the things Mr. Cummings warned would create errors in markets are cornerstones of the regulations behind the National Market System.

And why can’t a bid and offer be the same? Forcing them to be different means an intermediary is part of every trade. That’s why 40% of trading is in dark pools – to escape shill bids by trading intermediaries.

Why would Congress – which created the National Market System – mandate a middle man for stocks, when to get a good deal you cut the middle man out? Think about that with health care (or with government itself, which is the ultimate middle man).

But I digress.

We have a stock market the requires an intermediary, prohibits buying and selling at the same price (unless at the midpoint between them, which is the average, which is why index-investing is crushing stock-picking), and stops investors from paying the price they want and forces them instead to take a different price.

In Denver real estate, the bid to buy is often higher than the offer to sell because there aren’t enough houses. Don’t you want people paying more for your shares rather than less? So why do rules require the opposite?

I want us all thinking about whether the stock market serves our best interests in current form where passive investment is taking over everything.

I’ll be talking about that to the NIRI Capital Area chapter Apr 4, so come say hi. And we’ll be at NIRI Boston tonight self-congratulating with the rest of the sponsoring vendors in Sponsorpalooza. You all in Minneapolis, good seeing you last week!