Speaking of "Weekend Watering", I was going to work on a post that would show what HFT/Algos have done to the market since this article was written in The Economist in 2009
http://www.economist.com/node/14133802 but a pipe broke under a sink. So yeah, I had weekend watering alright.
In part from the article:
“It appears exchanges are conspiring with a privileged group of high-frequency traders in a massive fraud,” says Whitney Tilson, a fund manager. Requiring orders to be posted for at least a second would nullify the value of flash orders and of probing the market“.
Well we know that former head of the NYSE Grasso said to rip them out, and that his appearance on one of the financial shows (MSNBC I believe) was taken down within 24 hours. And we know that the recent consideration to require a time for a bid or offer to remain in the system was shot down. And we know that Wall Street pumped, and is pumping many millions of dollars into campaign coffers as well as lobbying hard on the Hill to tell legislators how we are all benefiting through liquidity. And we know that the banks have been pumped with taxpayer billions. In fact, everything is so good out there in the market we know it stinks. The book that was written in the 1940s was entitled, "Where Are All The Customer's Yachts?", should now read, "Where Are All The Customer's Homes?"
This is the institutionalized raping of the investor for you do not have the ability to hit a bid or an offer when it hits your screen a second or more after it happened, and it is valid for only nanoseconds. If you read the article above you'll see that not only was nothing done in 3 years, but it was placed on steroids.
Perhaps Cobra wants to put a poll up at the close on Friday asking if you have traded for 5 years or more (to have seen the mkts change), do you feel the mkts are harder to trade than before the 2008 mkt collapse? My answer is clearly yes for the average trader and I hope to find the time to illustrate my point in a cogent fashion in the next weekend or two.