What follows is advertisement for erectile dysfunction followed by advertisements for stock market dysfunction. While vaguely describing what HFT is, Steve Kroft and 60 Minutes never get to the real issues. Mary Schapiro certainly doesn’t get to the real issues and never has.
They are not talking about the illegality of placing orders and pulling bids in an attempt to move the market in a certain direction. They fail to address the fact that the HFTs can see bids and stops before they are even executed. They fail to talk about the now programmed Monday morning ramp jobs, or the morphed Friday afternoon front running of the Monday morning ramp job. They fail to fully address the issue of arbitraging milliseconds and the advantage that gives to the HFT firms who are mostly the very same banks who comprise the “Federal” Reserve Bank system, and they fail to address that it is these very same banks who also own and operate the exchanges. These are the same banks that comprise "the Fed" who designed TARP, QE, and now POMO's. Thus the very same people create the HFT fuel from thin air, they write the laws, they own the exchanges, they are the largest contributors to political campaigns, they own the HFT machines, they used to own the mortgage on your home but now the government does - in short they own YOU.
Here’s one for you… what if an HFT owner programs algorithms to PRODUCE a flash crash and to take advantage of the price swings occurring within one? Who is there to stop them? Is Mary Schapiro there to protect your stop order from being overrun by these criminals? Hell no, and that’s exactly what they do – they see your stops, they run you out of your position and they take YOUR money without even so much as a blink.
This is nothing but a FLUFF/ SPIN piece that I am showing only to show you what type of crap is being fed to the public. People have no idea just how unsafe their retirement money is. Billions in outflows? Get used to it, there is NO MARKET, there is only a criminal enterprise designed to take your productive efforts from you.
Wall Street: The Speed Traders
PS - we just learned that Mary Schapiro (the head of the SEC whose pay was benchmarked to CEOs of investment banks and the NYSE) received a farewell payment from FINRA Of $8,985,334.0!! Sweet, no conflict of interest there! (ht ZH)