Lights Out for Knight

This is surreal.

Knight Capital Group has a failure with its computerized trading program and suddenly loses more than $400 million dollars in a few minutes....or hours.

Anyway, so now they are almost immediately talking about filing for bankruptcy and liquidating assets.

MF Global fails, money missing. Peregrine Financial fails, money missing.

Knight Trading suddenly says it has $400 million missing and can't get it back. Apparently creditors also according to Bloomberg canceled credit lines, the life blood of Wall Street traders who hold positions for minutes sometimes, or an hour, but occasionally have to hold something for a month to work it out. Bloomberg referred to a lack of trust by the traders who use Knight to settle trades.



What if some Knight managers rigged this thing to divert the hundreds of millions to them....then claimed a failure and liquidated. Reuniting with their money placed in overseas accounts. What if a dark shadowy power told them to do this or they would be exposed for something they have done and want hidden. What if a shadowy power said do this or you will be killed....everyone knows the Mossad has no constraints. Nor the drug running CIA. What if some savvy IT people engineered this from the inside and the money went to them.

What if a competing Wall Street entity covetous of Knight’s business plotted to destroy it?

What if the IT wizards just accidentally built some mistakes into their sophisticated logarithms. These trades happen so fast there is no time for a failsafe switch. When the gyrations started happening no one at first knew where the problem was. Knight certainly did not have a doomsday button to stop trading.

If all these trades in supposedly hundreds of stocks were a mistake and bad it would be easy to track them and cancel them. Isn't everything tracked? Why was this not done? Were the trades linked to derivatives that are unregulated?

Last year I had a buy order for a European stock at five dollars a share or lower when it was trading above that level. The order was good for a month I think. ....and TD Ameritrade's program dropped down and sold me the stock for $4.25, a bargain for me....but they followed up and said it was a mistake and canceled the order. So why is Knight making good on its wrong order placement? Are the counterparties too big to offend?

Either this proves the financial system is too big to manage and needs to get broken up....or people are just looting the system under a variety of schemes.

TD Ameritrade was quick to claim a mistake and took way my good fortune. But Knight was not able to do this too?

Knight, by the way, handles about one sixth of all trades on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq and another platform, so it was a sizeable operation and important component of daily transactions. But TD Ameritrade places a lot of orders every day too as a large discount broker.

This also proves too that stocks and bonds are traded way too often. Warren Buffet has said that all stocks bought and sold should merit a surtax if they are not held for a month or more. That would slow the trading. And if U S Treasury bond investors would stop flipping their bonds every few minutes that would slow trading to a more sensible pace too. In fact, Buffet was a member of Salomon’s board when the U S Treasury accused it of buying more than a hundred percent of one bond issue, well over the 30 percent legal limit then in place. One rogue trader was blamed, in a culture that allowed it. Buffet cleaned house, using the $400 million he had at risk in the company, which ended up phasing out anyway eventually.

A one million dollar U S Treasury bond, issued for debt spending by the U S, will trade over and over every few minutes...which is how these huge chains of derivatives get built up based on a very tiny underlying asset. This trading, which is gambling in some respects, is done over and over to chisel a few dollars from a large million dollar bond, much like coin clipping in the middle ages.

Martin Mayer's book Nightmare on Wall Street, about the illegal trading in U S Treasury bonds by Salomon Brothers was written about 20 years ago. Clearly, Congress did not read the book. These financial wizards on Wall Street are always gaming the system. When they are not gaming they are having sudden losses from developing games they don't understand but implement anyway.. Arbitrage games like issuing a bond in British pounds but redeeming them in Mexican pesos that are priced in French francs that have been indexed with Brazilian oil prices. Things like that. Things that don't have to be so complicated in the first place. The Solomon traders were always coming up with derivative schemes for simple bonds and dumping them on supposedly sophisticated money managers...and Solomon could not understand why the customers would do it.

There have been so many large financial failure of late, including Madoff of course, the Congress and White House is clearly failing their oversight responsibilities, but we know that from their going along with abolishing Glass - Steagal, letting the SEC ban the uptick rule on short sales just months before the meltdown of 2008, total failure of regulation at the CFTC and SEC. Totally inept management by the Federal Reserve Bank, which creates booms and busts artificially.

The free markets mantra is totally discredited. Humankind does not have a moral compass yet to self manage freedom. No matter what the free marketers say.

Congress obviously can’t oversee the country’s financial system. The administrative branch’s regulators can’t regulate it.

Where is the modern Andrew Jackson, who killed the central bank of his day: Where is the Teddy Roosevelt, who busted up the trusts of his day?

It is apparent American business enterprises are too big to manage - from Lehman Brothers and Solomon, to MF Global and Peregrine Financial and now Knight Trading.

The free marketers say that’s okay. They should go under for bad management or mistakes or illegal behavior. But in 2008 the Congress and White House then in power said too big banks and corporations should be given welfare…at any price. The perps had free markets every step of the way, until their bad bets were too big to pay off.

Bad call.

Too damn much energy and brainpower is being spent on financials, financial instruments, and not enough energy and brainpower in just producing practical goods and services in the everyday world.