Is retail money creating a Pandemic Bubble? Sort of. Really, it’s Fast Traders turning those orders into clouds of squid ink.
There are 47 million customer accounts at Schwab, Fidelity, Ameritrade, E*Trade and Robinhood. These big online brokers sell their flow to Citadel, Two Sigma, Susquehanna’s G1X options platform, Virtu, UBS, options trader Wolverine, and others.
Nearly all of the orders are “non-directed,” meaning the broker determines where to send them. Also, more than three paragraphs of market structure goop and people grab a bottle of tequila and go back to day-trading.
So, let me explain.
Do you know CHK? A shale-oil play, it’s on the ropes financially. In May it was below $8. Yesterday CHK was near $70 when it halted for news. Which never came, and trading resumed. (Note: A stock should never, ever be halted for news, without news.)
It closed down hard near $24. Rumors have flown for weeks it’ll file bankruptcy. Why was it at $70? People don’t understand that public equity often becomes worthless if companies go bust. Debtholders convert to equity and wipe out the old shareholders.
Hertz (HTZ) went bankrupt May 26 and shares closed at $0.56. Monday it was over $5.50, up about 900%. HTZ debt is trading at less than 40 cents on the dollar, meaning bondholders don’t think they’ll be made whole – and they’re senior to equity.
This is bubble behavior. And it abounds. Stocks trading under $1 are up on average 79% since March, according to a CNBC report.
ABIO, a Colorado biotech normally trading about 10,000 shares daily with 1.6 million shares out made inconsequential reference to a Covid preclinical project (translation: There’s nothing there). The stock exploded, trading 83 million shares on May 28, or roughly 50 times the shares outstanding.
Look at NKLA. It’s been a top play for Robinhood clients and pandemic barstool sports day-trading. No products out yet, no revenue. DUO, an obscure Chinese tech stock trading on the Nasdaq yesterday jumped from about $10 to $129, closing above $47.
Heck, look at Macy’s. M, many thought, was teetering near failure amidst total retail shutdown. From about $4.50 Apr 2, it closed over $9.50 by June 8.
W, the online retailer that’s got just what you need, is up 700% since its March low despite losing a billion dollars in 2019.
When day traders were partying like it was 1999, in 1999, stocks for businesses with no revenues and products boomed. Then the Nasdaq lost 83% of its value.
About 95% of online-broker orders are sold to Fast Traders – the Citadels, the Two Sigmas, the Virtus. They’re buying the tick data (all the prices) in fractions of seconds. They know what’s in the pipeline, and what’s not.
Big online brokers sell flow to guarantee execution to retail traders. I shared my experience with GE trades. The problem is retail prices are the ammunition in the machine gun for Fast Traders. They know if clips are being loaded, or not. And since retail traders don’t direct their trades (they don’t tell the broker to send it to the NYSE, Nasdaq, Instinet, IEX, etc., to hide prices from Fast Traders), these are tracer rounds stitching market prices up and down wildly.
The Fast Traders buying it can freely splatter it all over the market in a frenzy of rapidly changing prices, the gun set on Full Automatic.
This is how Fast Traders use retail trades to cause Wayfair to rise 700%. The order flow bursts into the market like squid ink in the Caribbean (I’ve seen that happen snorkeling), and everyone is blinded until prices whoosh up 30%.
A money manager on CNBC yesterday was talking about the risk in HTZ. She said there were no HTZ shares to borrow. Even if you could, the cost was astronomical.
Being a market structure guy with cool market structure tools (you can use them too), I checked HTZ. Nearly 56% of trading volume is short. Borrowed. And the pattern (see here) is a colossus of Fast Trading, a choreographed crescendo into gouting squid ink.
How? Two Sigma, Hudson River Trading, Quantlab, etc., Fast Trading firms, enjoy market-making exemptions. They don’t have to locate shares. As high-speed firms “providing liquidity,” regulators let them do with stocks what the Federal Reserve does with our money. Digitally manufacture it.
Because they buy the flow from 47 million accounts, they know how to push prices.
That’s how ABIO traded 83 million shares (60% of the volume – nearly 50 million shares – was borrowed May 28, the rest the same shares trading many times per second).
It’s how CHK exploded up and then imploded as the manufactured currency vanished. And when stocks are volatility halted – which happened about 40 times for CHK the past two trading days – machines can game their skidding stop versus continuing trades in the ETFs and options and peer-group stocks related to the industry or sector.
This squid ink is enveloping the market, amid Pandemic psychology, and the economic (and epic) collapse of fundamental stock-pricing.
Dangerous.
You gotta know market structure, public companies (ask us) and investors (try EDGE).
