cryptogon.com

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 all 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.

High-frequency trading has come under greater scrutiny since the May 6 “flash crash,” when some high-frequency firms along with a number of other active traders withdrew from the market, arguably exacerbating the stocks’ swift downdraft that day.

High-speed trading, now estimated to account for about two-thirds of U.S. stock market volume, takes many forms, some entirely proper. Defenders say it reduces trading costs for all investors by adding volume to the market. Latency arbitrage is a type of trading that relies on ultrahigh speeds; it’s not clear which firms engage in it or how pervasive it is.

Some firms pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to individual exchanges for premium access to their price feeds, industry players and exchanges say.

The SEC, in a broad review of market structure earlier this year, said information from trading-center data feeds “can reach end-users faster than the consolidated data feeds.”

The latency arbitrage trade aims to game the so-called national best bid and offer price on a stock, which sets the price most investors use to trade.

The ability to estimate price moves ahead of the national best bid and offer price, which is consolidated electronically from exchanges, can give traders an advantage of about 100 to 200 milliseconds over investors who use standard market tools, according to a November 2009 report on such trading activities by Jefferies & Co.

An advanced look at exchange data and order flow can provide firms “the ability to forecast future prices” and “make adjustments to their orders in the market or send new orders which are based on this information,” the report found.

Some investors are searching for ways to protect themselves. Rich Gates, co-founder of TFS Capital LLC, started becoming concerned about latency arbitrage in early 2009 after a Wall Street bank pitched the trade to his firm.

In hundreds of tests, TFS has found that some of its trades were getting picked off by firms exploiting the time-delay wrinkle. That was costing the firm money.

To learn more, TFS, which manages about $1.1 billion in mutual funds and hedge funds, devised a method to essentially bait firms into engaging in the trade. In effect, TFS proved that some traders were wise to a movement in a stock’s price before it happened.

On a March afternoon, a TFS trader sent an order to a broker to buy shares of Nordson Corp., a maker of fluid dispensing equipment. The trader sent an instant message to the broker: “please route to broker pool #2,” a request to send the order to a specific dark pool.

The trader told the broker not to pay a price higher than the midpoint between what buyers and sellers were offering, which at the time was $70.49.

Several seconds after the dark pool order was placed, the market price didn’t change. Then the TFS trader set a trap: he sent a separate order into the broader market to sell Nordson for a price that pushed the midpoint price down to $70.47.

Almost immediately, TFS was sold Nordson for $70.49 — the old, higher midpoint — in broker pool No. 2, which didn’t reflect the new sell order. TFS got stuck paying two cents more than it should have, suggesting that some seller knew the higher price was a good deal to nab quickly.

Such trades are “unusually suspicious,” said Mr. Gates.

“At this point, it is our belief that it is not an accident,” said Brooks Cooper, an Oregon attorney suing Google in one of several class actions lawsuits around the country arising from Google’s disclosure that its Street View cars intercepted Wi-Fi traffic around the world. Google has described the sniffing as a coding error.

The evidence, the relevance of which Google disputed Thursday, is a 2008 Google patent application (.pdf) describing a method to increase the accuracy of location-based services – services that would allow advertisers or others to know almost the exact location of a mobile phone or other computing device. The patent application involves intercepting data and analyzing the timing of transmission as part of the method for pinpointing user locations.

The so-called “776? patent application, published by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January, describes “one or more of the methods” by which Google collects information for its Street View program, Cooper’s legal team said in court documents filed late Wednesday in federal court in Oregon.

Google spokeswoman Christine Chen said in an e-mail that the patent in question “is entirely unrelated to the software code used to collect Wi-Fi information with Street View cars.” In a follow up e-mail, Chen added that Google files “patent applications on a variety of ideas that our engineers come up with. Some of them mature into real products or services, and some of them don’t.”

The calls follow a report from Luxembourg police alleging Mr Sarkozy approved the creation of firms which received money from the commissions.

They allegedly financed then PM Edouard Balladur’s 1995 presidential campaign.

The two men have repeatedly dismissed allegations of illegal party funding.

French news website Mediapart quoted the Luxembourg police report as saying: “The agreements on the creation of the two companies appear to have come directly from Prime Minister Balladur and Finance [Budget] Minister Nicolas Sarkozy.

“Part of the funds that passed through Luxembourg [companies] came back to France to finance political campaigns” in 1995, added the police report, according to Mediapart.

Government spokesman Luc Chatel dismissed the recurring allegations as “a serial fairytale” and said the government was co-operating with an investigation by a French judge.

One of the MPs who asked for information, Socialist Party deputy leader Harlem Desir, called for French judges to obtain the Luxembourg police documents.

“The officials at the time, namely Edouard Balladur and Nicolas Sarkozy, the budget minister who was in charge of the sale and the commissions, must be asked to provide all the information that the French are waiting for,” Mr Desir said.

Since 2008, French investigators have been looking at allegations that the cancellation of commissions for one of the arms deals prompted an attack that killed 11 French naval engineers in Pakistan in 2002.

A crew is installing a seven-ton, 26-foot-tall concrete sculpture of an Egyptian god at the airport.

Anubis, a statue with a jackal-head, will be built south of the Jeppesen Terminal.

Although part of the lore of the 9,000-pound “Mustang” is that its creator, Luis Jiménez, was tragically killed while making the piece, Anubis may be even more notorious. He’s the Egyptian god of death and the afterlife.

It’s being put in to preview the Denver Art Museum’s King Tut exhibit.

As they walk in hooded robes to the strains of “Pomp and Circumstance,” many students getting their doctorates this spring dream of heading to another university to begin their careers as tenure-track professors.

But when Elena Stover finished her doctorate in September, she headed to the poker tables. Frustrated with the limited opportunities and grueling lifestyle of academia, Stover, 29, decided to eschew a career in cognitive neuroscience for one playing online poker. She got the idea from a UCLA career counselor, who was trying to help her find employment.

“The job market is abysmal, especially within the academic system,” said Stover, who spent six years getting her doctorate at UCLA.

It has never been easy to find a tenure-track teaching job. But this year, dwindling endowments and shrinking state budgets — especially in California — have made that goal more elusive than ever. Now, many graduates with doctoral degrees are finding themselves looking for jobs outside universities — jobs they probably could have gotten without five to six years of intense schooling and tens of thousands of dollars of education debt.

“That’s one of the weird things — after all this training, you should really have these career options, but in reality, it’s really scarce,” said Stover, who moved to Oakland, got a poker coach and says she’s making enough to pay the bills.

Budget cuts are plaguing California’s once-admired higher education system. The California State University system lost 10% of its teaching force over the last year, which is the equivalent of 1,230 full-time posts. The University of California’s share of state general fund revenue of $2.6 billion in the 2009-10 fiscal year was 20% less than it was two years earlier.

The placement of the cylindrical apparatus was confirmed by the U.S. disaster response chief, Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, in a statement describing the move as a “positive development” but “only a temporary and partial fix.”

“It will be some time before we can confirm that this method will work and to what extent it will mitigate the release of oil into the environment,” Allen said.

“Over the last few weeks I’ve watched, as we all have, with growing horror and heartache, watching what’s happening in the Gulf and thinking those morons don’t know what they’re doing,” Cameron said at the All Things Digital technology conference.

Posted on the Treasury Department website this afternoon, the National Debt hit $13,050,826,460,886.97 as of June 1st.