Dear CIGAs,
I will be taking a water safety class that is now required in Connecticut to operate a boat of any size if it has a motor on it, even if it is as low as 10hp.
It seems silly, but without a license to operate on the water even if you were in a canoe with an electric trawling motor you could get arrested. They have armed water police on Candlewood Lake in Connecticut.
What happened to freedom in the outdoors or did that go with the total loss of your indoor freedoms as well?
You probably need a permit now to camp in the Talketna, Alaska wilderness.
The only time for the boating class is this evening and tomorrow, so I will have to attend.
The gold price is doing exactly what it should considering the lack of real negative good reasons and coordinated negative PR from the media and the gold banks.
The dollar is going to suffer a very cold and awful winter.
It is amazing the moment one major fraud kills the world by the meltdown in OTC derivatives the Banksters are growing in size in another that is appropriately named the DARK POOLS.
The Dark Pools operate in a delayed reporting, after the fact and who knows if correct data world as to volume and price. Do you trust the Banksters on their word of honor to after the fact admit the volume of a trade?
All of this is with the blessings of those just charged with a mission of transparency.
Now you can understand why I and Mr. Fred want to motor ourselves into a quiet cove on a clear lake on a Saturday to enjoy freedom from all this that is around us. Sometimes we need to shut off the noise and just float for a couple of hours.
The filth in this financial world makes organized crime look like a vacation relief. The famous mobsters never killed and tortured as many people as the Banksters. It is not even close.
Banksters simply cannot play to win based on merit. Banksters cannot build anything. The Banksters game has to be fixed.
You always offer me, among the many other lamentations in your communication, the fear that gold and the dollar will always be manipulated to withhold true pricing.
My answer is manipulation only works in the direction anything wants to go in the first place, which gold and the dollar have so far proven correct. Step back and from the day to day ticks and look at the big picture.
The problems out there are so big that no central bank, treasury or group of Banksters anywhere on the planet can afford to handle them. Right now if it were not for the charisma of the new Administration things would have unwound completely.
In time the problems of today’s financial world to which there is no practical solution will overwhelm the manipulation by simple size of money motivated into the gold market and the number of newly created dollars for sale.
The size of the dollar pool is infinite, and the amount of gold is finite. That is the equation which will make Alf right in his take on the price. It only takes a failure of confidence to motivate the equation. This is why I have been trying to give you clear direction free of the fog of emotion and spin in order to protect you.
At every turn the media, government and Banksters have been trying to get you to dump your protection.
Stay the course. Gold is going to save more than your financial position.
Goldman Now Dominating Dark Pool Trading; Who Is Sigma X?
Posted by Tyler Durden at 12:52 PM
Sunday, June 7, 2009
The last time I discussed dark pools, it was in the context of SEC regulation due to the increasing sense of opacity of what happens in this subset of the stock market. A new Reuters article adds fuel to the fire, indicating that not only are dark pools aggressively taking away from exchange trading action, but it is in fact bank-run dark pools that are the primary culprit.
"Dark pools," where orders are anonymously matched so that traders do not alert the wider market to their intentions, have triggered concerns that stock pricing may not be transparent.
But the growth of those run by broker-dealers such as Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse are squeezing other "dark" electronic trading venues, as well as exchanges, resulting in lower fees.
"The dark pools are definitely going to grow; the wild card is any new regulation," said Dmitri Galinov, director and head of liquidity strategy at Credit Suisse’s advanced execution services, running the bank’s CrossFinder dark pool.
Overall, dark market share rose last year, but in the last eight months hit a ceiling near 9 percent of the U.S. market.
And while dark pools controlled by independent private ventures such as ITG would be a perfectly normal response to market demand for liquidity facilitation, it is surprising to discover that a vast majority of the pools are in fact controlled by the very same recipients of TARP funding (who are now doing all they can to issue stock so they can repay their TARP bonus burden).
Dark pools owned by brokers and large market makers accounted for 70 percent of all dark U.S. equity volume in April, up from 64 percent in December and from 58 percent a year earlier, according to Rosenblatt Securities, a widely referenced agency broker that tracks 18 dark pools.
Dark pools, which usually publish trades to the consolidated tape with little detail well after they are executed, have been around for decades, but their brands have gained more exposure in the last few years.
As frequent Zero Hedge readers know, when it comes to program trading on a traditional exchange such the NYSE, Goldman Sachs is by far the most dominant force. It is by Goldman’s own admission that the primary reason for this monopoly is to facilitate high-frequency trading in the open market. It would only be fitting that Goldman would be the dominant market player in the dark pool high-frequency market as well. And, as it turns out, it is.
Goldman’s Sigma X was the largest in April, followed by market maker GETCO’s Execution Services, and Credit Suisse’s CrossFinder — the winners benefiting from the collapse of other investment banks such as Lehman Brothers.
Justin Schack, vice president of market structure analysis at Rosenblatt, said broker-run dark pools had grown because they’re faster, cheaper and open to algorithms — the computerized trading programs that dominate the market, especially during volatile periods such as last year’s crash.
"Market structure has changed over the last five or six years in ways that favor small size, rapid-fire trading," Schack said. [SPY IOI anyone?]
The most successful bank-run dark pools have steady participation from individuals, or retailers, whose standing trade orders are gobbled up by high-frequency players who use algorithms and account for about 65 percent of the market.
