When the ship starts to sink, the rats begin to think only moments ahead. The big picture falls by the wayside. Surviving until tomorrow is all that matters. Next year is lifetimes away.
There are a few places in the world you can see this happening in real-time.
One such place is Wall Street.
Case in point:
The flash boys are hitting a dead-end. Bloomberg has just reported on a strange real estate buy in Chicago. A tiny group of stock traders purchased 31 acres of undeveloped land for $14 million, twice the going rate… just to plop down an antenna.
Looking at the paperwork, the antenna is owned by World Class Wireless, an affiliate of Jump Traders.
And here’s why…
Just across the street is the building for the CME Group – the world’s largest futures exchange.
‘The high tech microwave antenna,’ ex-Wall Streeter Dr. Fly writes in his iBankCoin blog, ‘is able to intercept data coming out of the CME before it makes its way to the east coast – creating an arb situation that last microseconds. It is the definition of cheating, rich, powerful people using their position to jimmy rig trades in their favor, all but guaranteed. It’s like having a time machine that can go a microsecond into the future and see prices and then trade off of the knowledge using very sophisticated high speed quants.’
This post was published at Laissez Faire on May 12, 2017.
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