Archive for the 'Regulations' Category

Rise of the Algos – Knight Capital and the Inevitable Catastrophic HFT Market Meltdown

By mw | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Banks, News, Regulations, Wall Street, WTF?

A High Frequency Trading proprietary algorithm crafted by highly compensated brains-on-sticks and nurtured in the bowels of an investment bank escaped into the wild. From its carefully co-located massively parallel high speed trading computer it emerged to wreak havoc on the financial markets. In this case, it was a happy ending. The algo turned on its master and sucked the very life blood out of the firm that deployed it.Once Knight Capital’s algo was identifed as the culprit, the public company’s stock was slashed by 1/3 – a $300 million market cap haircut decapitation. That was Wednesday before we knew how much the algo lost on the trades. On Thursday morning KCG’s stock was slashed in half again when the trading loss was being reported at $440 Million. The incident is yet another lights-flashing, klaxon-blaring warning signal that competing HFT algorithms operating with the speed, size and complexity that are commonplace today cannot be adequately regulated, tested, or managed. Their interactions with each other cannot even be fully understood or predicted.

August 3rd, 2012 | Permalink| 14 Comments »

Rand Paul’s Sad, Slow Implosion

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Elections, Energy, Libertarian, Oil, Regulations, Republicans, Senate, Video

First it was the wishy-washiness of the civil rights act repeal and now it’s criticism of the administration being tough on BP? Watch the video… Here’s the thing…yes, accidents happen on offshore oil rigs. However, most damage is mitigated by appropriate safety measures being put in place to keep spills to a minimum. However, recent [...]

May 21st, 2010 | Permalink| 8 Comments »

Obama To Announce Massive Financial Regulation Overhaul

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Banks, Barack, Money, Obama, Regulations

Even though he’s only been in office for 5 months, this has still be a long time coming. And there are some important measures being introduced for home loans and consumer protection. From Wash Post: Many of the specific proposals will require legislation, and today’s announcement will drop the plan into an already heated debate [...]

June 17th, 2009 | Permalink| 2 Comments »

Equal Protection As Libertarian Ideal

By Mark Thompson | Related entries in Conservatism, Drugs, Libertarian, Politics, Regulations

Thanks to John, I am pointed to these two rather strange arguments in favor of the Drug War and against libertarian use of statistics on race against the Drug War from Jonah Goldberg. John does a pretty good job explaining why Goldberg’s arguments are so strange. The only thing I’d really add is that the [...]

April 7th, 2009 | Permalink| 5 Comments »

Geithner Wants Broader Powers To Seize Non-Banks

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Bailouts, Business, Money, Regulations, The World, Transparency, Wall Street

And after the AIG mess, I say we give it to him. How we allowed one company to take down the entire system still feels unreal to me. How on earth could we allow that to go down? Crazy, crazy, crazy. But it did happen and we are suffering massive fallout as a result, so [...]

March 24th, 2009 | Permalink| 44 Comments »