Was Information Fed Pre-Fed?

Last Wednesday the Fed concluded its two-day Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting and issued its statement, deciding to hold the Fed Funds rate between 0.25% and 0.50%, as expected. The accompanying economic projections show that Fed policy-makers currently expect to raise rates only twice this year, down from their December median projection of 4 rate hikes in 2016. Markets responded in kind to the Fed’s more accommodating monetary stance, with 2-year yields falling, the dollar weakening, and gold rallying. 

One of our readers passed along a chart showing an 890,000 share spike in volume in GLD (the SPDR Gold Shares ETF) about 20 minutes before the 2:00 FOMC statement release — a volume spike which doesn’t create any noticeable spike in the market. We dug into Bloomberg’s “Trade/Quote Recap” data and found that there was a single execution of 825,000 shares. 

Source: Bloomberg 

Our reader was suspicious of the timing, suggesting that perhaps the statement and updated projections had been leaked. 

We certainly would not dismiss the possibility of information leakage and the timing of the block trade certainly is curious, but it’s worth being skeptical in this instance: there are plenty of innocent explanations for a block trade in GLD — even one so close to the release of the FOMC statement: 

First up, is a trade of 825,000 shares of GLD all that unusual? According to Bloomberg, and not counting opening and closing crosses, there were 36 trades of 500,000 shares or more (ranging up to 1.8 million shares per trade) in the previous 30 trading days. So while trades of half a million shares or more of GLD are not exactly an hourly occurrence, they do occur slightly more than once per day. 

Next, we cannot ignore the (albeit remote) possibilities that (1) investors (or traders) weren’t targeting the vanilla GLD, as much as delta-hedging a large options position or (2) that the GLD transaction was part of an arbitrage strategy in which a trader bought or sold GLD shares against a short or long position in gold futures. (If we assume a delta of .50 for an at-the-money option, then an 825k share cash position suggests the options position would be around 1.65 million shares, or 16,500 contracts.) 

Finally, we can’t be sure that this trade was initiated by a buyer — there are, of course, two sides to every trade.[1] Perhaps the customer initiating the trade was a seller and the broker-dealer bought the block (or found the other side of the trade) in order to facilitate a customer sell order.  In other words, maybe it was a large seller, looking to get out of a long position before the Fed decision. We have no way of knowing which side of the trade the customer was on, nor whether the broker-dealer took principal risk or found the other side of the trade. (FINRA would, however, be able to dig further, if so inclined, via the OATS system, which enables them to monitor the detailed history and execution of orders.)

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[1] We do know, per Bloomberg, that the trade was reported via FINRA’s ADF, which means that the execution did not occur on an exchange. So, it could have occurred in a dark pool or other Alternative Trading System (ATS) venue, but more likely it was done through an institutional broker. 

The Trading's Trailing Off

There's been some generally miserable news floating about about big bank trading levels.

In a Forbes article, the team at Trefis put lower trading revenues down to "an overall reduction in trading activity over the period (a temporary factor) and a reduction in total market size as a direct result of stricter regulations (a permanent factor)."

Meanwhile, a number of media outlets were quick to cover the fact that trading levels within Barclays' dark pool has declined an incredible 66% during the week ending June 30th, versus the prior week.

We investigated this a little further and found that the week ending June 30th was not a good one for any of the alternative trading systems (ATSs).  It's not necessarily (or only) that Barclays' former clients may have been aggrieved at certain claims or findings made public in the NY Attorney General's complaint filing against Barclays, as could be inferred from a strict reading of some of the coverage -- but that trading levels at ATSs declined generally, with overall trading levels off 25% across the board, and by a median of roughly 20% across all ATSs.  The numbers are still in the same region even if we control for smaller ATSs, by only looking at the 15 largest ATSs as measured by share-trading volume for the week ending June 9.

Banking pundits will be hoping this is only midsummer madness, or maybe due to interim distractions from the Football World Cup.  The week ending June 30th coincided with the final week of group games.

Anyhow, here are the numbers from our extraction of aggregated trade data reported by ATSs to FINRA pursuant to Rule 4552.

Are "Dark Pool" Probes Pending?

Banks' so-called "dark pool" trading venues are all the rage these days.

The media jumped when dark pools were cited in federal authorities' and investor class action complaints against SAC Capital and its executives. The focus was on how the anonymity associated with dark pools, and the levels of secrecy they provide, allowed SAC and/or its members to avoid detection and potential losses on its sale of stock. (See also Gazing into 'dark pools,' the tool that enables anonymous insider trading)

One quote from a complaint reads:

“We executed a sale of over 10.5 million ELN for [various portfolios at CR Intrinsic and SAC LP] at an avg price of 34.21. This was executed quietly and efficiently over a 4 day period through algos and darkpools and booked into two firm accounts that have very limited viewing access.”

Next Goldies brought its dark pool, Sigma X, to the fore.  Having discovered pricing errors within the opaque pool, Goldman reportedly decided to send refund checks to customers to compensate them for the mistakes.

Michael Lewis didn't make matters any easier for Goldman or dark pools, giving them a hard time in his new book, Flash Boys.  Among other things, he casts doubt on whether investors got "best execution" through the dark pools:

“A broker was expected to find the best possible price in the market for his customer. The Goldman Sachs dark pool—to take one example—was less than 2 percent of the entire market. So why did nearly 50 percent of the customer orders routed into Goldman’s dark pool end up being executed inside that pool—rather than out in the wider market.”

That quote, alone, might not be altogether convincing: it's not clear whether he's looking at scenarios in which Goldman's clients have requested execution through the Sigma X, or whether Goldman's clients, requesting best execution, were oddly quite regularly executed through Sigma X, despite the potential for sub-optimal execution through that platform.  It's probably fair to say that those requesting execution through the dark pool would agree that they were foregoing "best execution" in the market - which is something one typically foregoes even with "hidden" orders submitted to an (open) exchange.

But now Goldies is back in the spotlight.  According to today's WSJ, they're considering shutting down their dark pool.

But why?

According to the Journal article, Goldman executives are weighing the benefits of the revenues it produces, against the burdens dealing with trading glitches and negative press.  Some burdens those must be, given Sigma X is purportedly one of the largest bank dark pools, and is likely producing significant flow.

Perhaps there's another theory...

Consider these stories:

In January 2014 Barclays decided to shut down its retail / margin Foreign Exchange business, Barclays Margin FX; in February, NY regulator Lawsky opened a currency markets probe.

In January 2014 Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) announced that it will withdraw from participating in setting gold and silver benchmarks in London;  in March, the CFTC announced that it is looking at issues including whether the setting of prices for gold—and the smaller silver market—is transparent. 

In July 2013, the CFTC put metals warehouses on notice of a possible probe. By November 2013 Goldman was resuming talks to sell its metals warehouses and seeking a buyer for its uranium trading unit; and by March 2014 we had various notices of JP Morgan's intent to sell its physical commodities divisions.

Probe and Sale

We could go on and on, but ultimately these are all anecdotal and we aren't wanting or looking to prove statistical significance at this stage.  We're also not too concerned about what comes first: the probe or the sale.  There's certainly no one-to-one mapping.  Not every regulatory probe is followed by a sale, or vice-versa.  We're only wondering if there's a pattern. And if there's a pattern, could there be an explanation as to why there's a pattern?

Here's one theory.  (We welcome yours.)  Might it be that, pending a likely or imminent (and embarrassing or expensive) enforcement action, banks may take preemptive action in selling "problematic" divisions ... to enable the negotiation of a more lenient settlement as they're (now) less likely to be repeat offenders of whatever activity was the subject of the probe?

In other words, is a dark pool probe pending?