Wall Street the New Robber Barons

If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.
Latin proverb

Yet another strong indication of why the markets are behaving strangely. Perhaps this partially accounts for the fact that the Dow has put in 37 new highs on what if one is polite one will call terrible volume. The SEC is allowing all the big guys to legally rob the small player. One wonders what purpose the SEC serves other than helping crooks perform even better. We are sure that many big banks are using this loophole to rob the average Joe. So banks are allowed to borrow money for almost nothing, then they use this to trade instead of lending it out, and now they can use super fast computers to gain an even bigger advantage over the smaller player. No wonder banks account for roughly 75% of the daily trading volume.

We wonder when the average Joe will stand up and demand real change from the crooks in Washington,  the bankers concubines The SEC is a Joke, they only attempt to do something when it’s too late and even then they drag their feet.

On a separate note, our adult index clearly indicated the decline of morality as we know it and the “I will do anything for the money syndrome gaining traction” years in advance. The adult index has been in a steep uptrend for several years now. Expect this situation to worsen with the progress of time, until a point is reached where the masses finally take a stand and demand change instead of just asking for it

Some fast-moving computer-driven investment firms are getting an edge by trading on market data before it gets to other investors, according to market players and researchers who have studied the trading.

The firms gain that advantage by buying data from stock exchanges and feeding it into supercomputers that calculate stock prices a fraction of a second before most other investors see the numbers. That lets these traders shave pennies per share from trades, which when multiplied by thousands of trades can earn the firms big profits. Critics call the practice the modern day equivalent of looking at share prices listed in tomorrow’s newspaper stock tables today.

“It is a rigged game,” Sal Arnuk, co-founder of brokerage firm Themis Trading, said Wednesday at a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable discussion in Washington, D.C., referring to the trading activity, which some call “latency arbitrage.”

While legal, the practice pushes the envelope of what is fair, critics say, and raises questions about the advantages some fast-moving traders are gaining in the market. The SEC roundtable convened executives from trading centers and firms across Wall Street as the agency continues to probe high-frequency trading and the growth of dark pools, trading venues where trades take place away from the main exchanges. Full story

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We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.
Oliver Wendell Holme

Read the original story at The Tactical Investor