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A bizarre trend has emerged during these hazy, lazy days of late summer. Overall market volume is unsurprisingly wafer-thin, but a big chunk of trading has been in just four financial companies that have received a healthy dose of support from Washington in order to make it through the credit crisis.
..
This is kind of scary. It suggests that the late-summer portion of the almost six-month long market rally is being fueled more by speculation and momentum, not real optimism about a potential.
There is an oft-repeated lie that "High Frequency Trading" adds lots of liquidity to the market, and thus is a "good thing."
But repeating a lie a thousand times does not make it true. It just makes you a damn liar instead of an ordinary liar.
Let's postulate two HFT computers passing 1,000 share orders for the mythical Frobozz (FBOZ) back and forth between each other. There's a scadload of volume generated by these transactions, and an outside observer, who is unaware that the 1 million shares are in fact 1,000 transactions of the same 1,000 shares being passed back and forth between the same two guys, might assume that there's a lot of liquidity that has been added.
But this is in fact misleading, as the following example will demonstrate.
"Anecdotally, I don't know anyone that really loves the market but it continues to go up," said John Norris, managing director of wealth management with Oakworth Capital Bank in Birmingham, Ala. "Whenever you have a concentration in a small group of stocks, it's worrisome. Perhaps it could be a sign that this rally is set to peter out."
But repeating a lie a thousand times does not make it true. It just makes you a damn liar instead of an ordinary liar.