The Uptick Rule - Your Thoughts

Quote from bellman:





Consider that the short seller will on average cover his short more quickly than the seller who has closed a long position. Once an investor has exited a long position, he is unlikely to buy in the near term unless new fundamental information becomes available to him.


Please tell me this is not really your logic. A short seller typically holds what percentage of shares outstanding vs. a long holder? shorts can represent what 10, 15, 20% of O/S. Hardly the buy back volume we are all looking for. When a short covers that cover represents minimal volume relative to overall volume. They are at best market making volume.
 
Quote from bevo96:

Patchie,

Dont assume that everyone on this board is a hack daytrader....some of us read it for amusement and post stupid comments occasionally just to solicit a response.

Its clear that everyone who understands how the current market microstructure works knows this is an irrelevant idea. Even the SEC committee understands this, I was on a call with the team CSFB sent to monitor the hearing yesterday afternoon. They made it pretty clear that the committee is only considering reimplementing the rule due to pressure from the Senators and Representatives in Washington that have ZERO understand of how the current market structure works. They just want to appease the retail public who have been convinced by idiots like Jim Cramer that the reason there portfolios are down 35% is because of "bear raids" and not shitty fundamentals.

The buy side fund managers you quote are COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT to market liquidity. These guys make their money from charging fees on funds invested with them...not from actually trading profitably. Of course they want the rule in place if it increases the probability that they will get more AUM and thus make more money.

Here is why the short sale rule will impact liquidity:

The High Frequency prop shops that make up approx 50% of the equity market daily volume (I work for one of them) estimate that their available opportunities will drop by 15-20% if an UPTICK or UPBID rule is put in place. How do I know this? Because, firms like mine are constantly monitoring and lobbying the situation. We can all easily estimate the impact on our volumes buy running the new rules thru a backtest. It is much less likely that a high frequency model will want to hit a bid on an uptick than a downtick. Its pretty simple to understand if you have ANY understanding of short term auto correlations or microstructure arbitrage.

Other long/short stat arb funds will not be able to effectively enter quant model driven pairs trades if the rule is in place. They estimate their volumes will drop by the same 15-20%. When you combine the loss in trading volumes across the quant shops (WE KNOW THIS BECAUSE WE CAN MODEL THE RULE SET ON CURRENT DATA) you are looking at a loss of 12-15% of the total market volume from an UPTICK or UPBID rule.

This means that when an institutional buy side firm puts a 20,000 share bid out that would normally be hit by a quant shop or group of quant shops arbing microstructure, now that order will take much longer to get filled and will have a greater risk of impacting the market higher, thus increasing their execution slippage and costing them return (NOT THAT THE BUY SIDE FIRMS REALLY CARE ABOUT MAKING MONEY).

It is also going to cost the ECNs and exchanges hundreds of millions of dollars to implement and test the new rule set. BATS doesn't even have legacy code for an upbid or uptick rule. Barney Frank and the other morons think you can just make the change and the next day the guys calling out to each other on the floor of the NYSE will just "know the rule and abide by it". The markets don't function that way anymore. The majority of the trades are executed electronically now. It is a VERY COSTLY policy in terms of technological implementation and market liquidity.

Also, in this microsecond world, how can INET, BATS or Arca be expected to know the actual tick state across all markets at any given microsecond? The network latency between matching engines is at least 1ms. Of course most people dont trade anywhere near the microsecond world, but 50% of the market volume lives and dies by it.

In reality bear raids dont really exisit. The velocity to "fair value" is just much faster than most of the old school guys are used to. You dont see guys jamming CDS's in XOM or any other financially healthy company and raiding the stock do you??? The company and other funds would appreciate the buying opportunity and squeeze them to oblivion.

If you are running a highly levered, low margin business with debt covenants tied to your stock price then you are just asking for trouble. If companies were run more responsibly we wouldn't have to create artificial mechanisms to protect them.


Why is it that a down tick rule should not also be implemented? Short squeezes create artificial bubbles that are equally detrimental to the capital markets.

I love how people want an asymmetrically "fair" rule.

Well said! I support retail, prop and quant trading - most people don't understand the volumes and speeds involved with trading today.

How easily people confuse "short selling" and "naked short selling" If anything - not enforcing the ban on "naked short selling" is the cause of the quicker decline in the markets - not "short selling."

-gastropod
 
What has happened, in essence, is, the Street guys have totally disengaged from the actuality that quotes represent people, companies and real capital. In their quant minds, everything was game. and they were right, and wrong.

Now, the problem is, the lawmakers have control. They will do some very onerous things because the public demands it. You can call them rubes, idiots, whatever. The Street loses. Simple. End of story. And they have to. Because left to themselves, they'll steal everything. They already tried.

Let's see what the indictments say. They're coming, you know. Somebody has to hang for this, and it' isn't going to be the buy side guys at Calpers.
 
Yeah, what's this lovefest with quants, prop shops (little more thean leveraged OTB parlors) , and gamers?

Liquidity
dripping-faucet.jpg
providers my ass. That's the hype they tell you to justify their skimming operations.

That you buy into it says more about your gullible natures that you should be revealing in public.
 
what bothers me is that the bid offers will always be much larger than the ask.
I have already noticed it is becoming a lot harder to exit a short position compared to a long position.
the MM only has to have 100 shares available and I have notice I am getting a lot more part fills on stocks even like rimm never mind stocks with a thinner volume like nflx.
what I see happening is that shorts are forced to exit at several prices to exit thereby driving the price of the stock up artificially until the short interest is reduced and the stock gaps down or retraces to a more realistic price.
 
Remember we are only dealing with paper. Stocks are speculation, even if the government coerces you act differently.

To create an uptick rule without a downtick rule is illogical, stupid, and downright evil to a logical end.

In fact, I argue that a downtick rule makes much more since then an uptick. If prices are kept in line with dividend payouts, then bubbles would never be created and actual ownership of companies a reality. Speculation would be kept in check, and companies with actual earnings would be priced accordingly.

Anybody who invests in a 401, IRA, ect can thank shorts for actually giving them prices that have real earnings to back them up and hold up when cycles play.

Shorts be praised. They put the snake oil salesmen out of business, thus allowing ownership in actual real business models.

Those who created the problems will be the first to blame anybody else, even if it was the very people who tried to save them...................
 
Quote from mgmaggie:

what bothers me is that the bid offers will always be much larger than the ask.
I have already noticed it is becoming a lot harder to exit a short position compared to a long position.
the MM only has to have 100 shares available and I have notice I am getting a lot more part fills on stocks even like rimm never mind stocks with a thinner volume like nflx.
what I see happening is that shorts are forced to exit at several prices to exit thereby driving the price of the stock up artificially until the short interest is reduced and the stock gaps down or retraces to a more realistic price.

Well, for a long time, they forced prices down artificially. If we had a regulatory agency who didn't take bribes, made everyone play by rules, you wouldn't be forced up, or down. Companies wouldn't be afraid to come public. Hedgefund managers wouldn't live in 100,000,000 dollar mansions, on and on.
 
That may be, but seems to be a totally separate, albeit indirectly related issue to the uptick rule.

Quote from flytiger:

They don't cover. What do you think ex - clearing is about? They just pass the fails around and keep the money.

You all talk like things that happen have some fundamentals to them. The whole thing is a game to fleece the public, which includes morons at buy side pension funds. It's all one big sleight of hand.

A little jail time, some treble damages, we'll right the ship. But it's going to be like going down Niagra falls in a barrel.
 
During the specific situation I was describing, quick downward movements in stock price, I am unsure what exact percentage of the selling pressure is from short sellers. I would reckon it was a significant proportion, and every percentage you listed would be what I would consider significant.

Besides that you seem to have misunderstood entirely my point that a short seller is more likely to cover sooner than a long seller is to re-buy the same equity. In other words, selling pressure by a short seller will be followed more quickly by an equal amount of buying pressure (from the same market participant) than that which occurs after a sell exiting a long position occurs.

From what I gather neither of the two people who responded to my post understood what I was getting at. I may not have clearly explained what I was saying.

Quote from patchie:

Please tell me this is not really your logic. A short seller typically holds what percentage of shares outstanding vs. a long holder? shorts can represent what 10, 15, 20% of O/S. Hardly the buy back volume we are all looking for. When a short covers that cover represents minimal volume relative to overall volume. They are at best market making volume.
 
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