SEC Reviewing U.S. Trading Practices After Decade-Long Shift to Automation

By Nina Mehta and Josh Gallu

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is examining equity trading practices that gained dominance in the past decade amid a shift to automation, according to an official in the agency’s enforcement division.

Daniel Hawke, head of the market-abuse unit, said at an event yesterday that the SEC is looking into techniques such as co-location, in which exchanges let traders place computers close to the market’s systems to shave time off executions. He said other practices under examination include the rebates that venues pay to spur transactions, direct market access where brokers let investors send orders to venues themselves, and whether the types of orders exchanges offer are being misused.

Regulators are evaluating U.S. markets after rules since the 1990s boosted competition and spread stock trading across 13 exchanges and dozens of private, broker-run venues. While the shift cut investors’ costs, it made trading more complex, and scrutiny increased after a May 2010 rout erased $862 billion from equities in less than 20 minutes. Several practices Hawke highlighted are used by firms engaged in high-speed trading.

“No one’s been able to prove whether high-frequency trading is good or bad,” Larry Tabb, chief executive officer of research firm Tabb Group LLC in New York, said in a telephone interview. “They don’t have a consolidated audit trail, clean access to good data or the quantitative analysts to really analyze data, so they’re doing it through the resources they have — which is through enforcement.”

Read the rest here.

By Inyoung Hwang – Feb 24, 2012 2:26 PM ET

A 10 percentage point increase in bets by hedge funds that equities will gain wasn’t enough to keep their short sales from limiting returns to half the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s performance in 2012.

The average equity hedge fund returned 3 percent this year through Feb. 10, compared with 7 percent for the S&P 500, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said in a report dated Feb. 21. A Goldman Sachs index of the 50 most-common stock investments at hedge funds gained 10 percent.

The funds lagged behind even after boosting their net long exposure, a measure of how much they’re investing in bets that stocks will rise, to 46 percent in the fourth quarter from 36 percent at the end of September. The figure was down from 50 percent in December 2010.

The outperformance of the Goldman Sachs Hedge Fund VIP Basket suggests “that ‘hedges’ and modest net exposure have created a drag on performance rather than poor stock selection,” wrote David Kostin, a New York-based strategist at Goldman Sachs, in the Feb. 21 note. “Despite finding success with their top picks, lack of net exposure to the cyclical rally has caused hedge funds to lag both the S&P 500 and the average large-cap core mutual fund so far in 2012.”

Improved data on U.S. jobs, manufacturing and housing have helped S&P 500 industries linked to the economy do best in 2012, led by technology and financial companies. Unprecedented market volatility and concern Europe’s sovereign debt crisis would trigger a global recession boosted the appeal of defensive stocks last year, causing utility and consumer staples companies to post the highest returns.

Read the rest here.

Joe Weisenthal

Over the past several days, we’ve seen several arguments for why surging gasoline prices won’tharm the economy.

They range from:

• We have more domestic production these days.
• Other commodities aren’t surging, so the inflationary effects are more narrow.
• Plummeting Natural gas prices are saving people a ton of heating, offsetting gas.
• Gas prices aren’t surging at a fast enough clip to freak consumers out.

And so on…

On the other hand, there seems to be a good history of gas prices harming the economy, and all of the above counter-arguments have a certain it’s different this time feel to them.

The pseudonymous blogger New Deal Democrat has a great post looking at what he calls the current “duel” between initial claims, which are falling, and gas prices. He notes that the same duel took place in 2011, and that ultimately, gas prices choked off the recovery, preventing it from really gathering momentum.

So how to know that gas prices are winning this time?

Set aside Wisconsin’s Governor Walker for a moment – another crucial ‘unions vs. the people’ showdown is happening right now in New York.

Most of us have heard of mixed martial arts (MMA), the fastest growing sport in the world, and its largest organization, the Ultimate Fighter Champion (UFC).  Conservative radio host and best-selling author Mark Levin gushes it is “the greatest sport around.”  Of the 48 states with athletic commissions, MMA has been legalized in every single one – save for three:  Connecticut (though MMA is allowed within its Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun reservations), Vermont, and… New York.  New York?!  Seems odd that the home of millions of MMA fans, of Madison Square Garden, and of the most historic entertainment events, is one of the lone standouts.  The reason?  The unions.

“But why do unions, whose members would benefit from the legalization of MMA through added jobs and wages, oppose this legalization?,” you wonder.  Good question.

Writing for National Review last month, I touched upon the unions’ reasons for preventing MMA’s legalization:

Ever wonder why there’s never been an MMA match at Madison Square Garden, or anywhere in New York State? Thank the unions and their notorious strong-arm tactics. . . . As Lorenzo Fertitta [majority shareholder of the UFC’s parent company, Zuffa, Inc.] explained: “The fact that MMA is not legal in New York is solely because of the Culinary Union.”  Wait, what?!  Fertitta is referring to the Culinary Workers Union, Local 226, a 60,000-member union in Nevada representing those in the hospitality industry, mostly casino employees. Through Zuffa, the Fertitta brothers [Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta] are the majority shareholders of the UFC. Frank is also CEO/Chairman of Station Casinos Inc., the Fertitta family business started by his grandfather in 1976 with a mere 90 employees, which grew into a nearly $1 billion company with 13,000 employees — employees who have elected not to unionize, making Station Casinos the largest non-union gaming company in the country — the Wal-Mart of the gaming world, if you will.

Safe to say, the Fertittas are not on any union bosses’ Christmas list. For 30 years, the Culinary Union has tried unsuccessfully to unionize Station Casinos’ employees. So, in an apparent effort to put pressure on the Fertittas (or to exact a bit of retribution), the Culinary Union has made it a point to prevent MMA’s legalization, using its affiliates’ substantial political power in New York.

This past October, USA Today noted the unions’ relentless attacks on MMA: “As part of its campaign to pressure the Fertittas, the Culinary Union has tried to cut into their UFC business by going through government and political channels.”  (emphasis added)  The article recaps the unions’ tactics:  backing anti-MMA legislation in New York; calling on the FTC to investigate UFC for monopolistic practices [the FTC announced last month it was closing its investigation, having found nothing of concern]; a website focused exclusively on attacking UFC President Dana White; a petition calling on Fox to back away from its deal to broadcast UFC events; and demanding Anheuser-Busch pull its Bud Light sponsorship of UFC.

Their latest attack?

Read the rest here.

TALLAHASSEE —

Since the state began testing welfare applicants for drugs in July, about 2 percent have tested positive, preliminary data shows.

Ninety-six percent proved to be drug free — leaving the state on the hook to reimburse the cost of their tests.

The initiative may save the state a few dollars anyway, bearing out one of Gov. Rick Scott’s arguments for implementing it. But the low test fail-rate undercuts another of his arguments: that people on welfare are more likely to use drugs.

At Scott’s urging, the Legislature implemented the new requirement earlier this year that applicants for temporary cash assistance pass a drug test before collecting any benefits.

The law, which took effect July 1, requires applicants to pay for their own drug tests. Those who test drug-free are reimbursed by the state, and those who fail cannot receive benefits for a year.

Having begun the drug testing in mid-July, the state Department of Children and Families is still tabulating the results. But at least 1,000 welfare applicants took the drug tests through mid-August, according to the department, which expects at least 1,500 applicants to take the tests monthly.

So far, they say, about 2 percent of applicants are failing the test; another 2 percent are not completing the application process, for reasons unspecified.

Cost of the tests averages about $30. Assuming that 1,000 to 1,500 applicants take the test every month, the state will owe about $28,800-$43,200 monthly in reimbursements to those who test drug-free.

That compares with roughly $32,200-$48,200 the state may save on one month’s worth of rejected applicants.

The savings assume that 20 to 30 people — 2 percent of 1,000 to 1,500 tested — fail the drug test every month. On average, a welfare recipient costs the state $134 in monthly benefits, which the rejected applicants won’t get, saving the state $2,680-$3,350 per month.

But since one failed test disqualifies an applicant for a full year’s worth of benefits, the state could save $32,200-$48,200 annually on the applicants rejected in a single month.

Net savings to the state — $3,400 to $8,200 annually on one month’s worth of rejected applicants. Over 12 months, the money saved on all rejected applicants would add up to $40,800-$98,400 for the cash assistance program that state analysts have predicted will cost $178 million this fiscal year.

Actual savings will vary, however, since not all of the applicants denied benefits might have actually collected them for the full year. Under certain circumstances, applicants who failed their drug test can reapply for benefits after six months.

The as-yet uncalculated cost of staff hours and other resources that DCF has had to spend on implementing the program may wipe out most or all of the apparent savings, said Derek Newton, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. The program will grow costlier yet, he said, if it draws a legal challenge.

Read the rest here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=41jq_5ltkno

Kentucky bourbon makers say President Obama’s corporate tax overhaul could hobble their industry and cause major economic hardship in the Bluegrass State.

The makers of Woodford Reserve, Jack Daniels and Evan Williams are worried about the elimination of an accounting method that allows companies to lower their tax burdens by boosting the costs associated with inventory held for a long period.

Obama’s Treasury Department sees the “last in, first out” (LIFO) accounting rule as a loophole. By eliminating it and other tax provisions, Obama would pay to lower the top corporate tax ratefrom 35 percent to 28 percent.

Bourbon makers, however, argue their taxes would skyrocket if the decades-old accounting system is discarded and the lower corporate rate doesn’t make up for that.

The system benefits bourbon makers especially because it allows them to count their most recent inventory costs against new revenue, which results in a lower profit margin. Without LIFO, bourbon makers would have to count inventory costs when bourbon was initially distilled and before it is aged.

For a bottle of 12-year-old bottle of bourbon, this makes a big difference given inflation.

To fight the change, bourbon makers like Brown-Forman and Heaven Hill have enlisted members of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus such as Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) and Geoff Davis (R-Ky.).

“This could cost a lot of jobs,” Yarmuth said, noting there are 9,000 people employed in distilling in Kentucky.

Bourbon makers also have a powerful ally in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“Sen. McConnell, like the President’s own Small Business Administration, opposes the President’s proposed tax hike on job creators,” spokesman Don Stewart said.

He cited a 2009 letter from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy saying that that LIFO repeal could “force many small businesses to close.”

Though a corporate tax overhaul could be years away, Yarmuth and others in the caucus are worried LIFO could become a bargaining chip at the end of this year when Congress and Obama look to replace $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts triggered by the failure of the debt supercommittee.

Eliminating LIFO would raise $52 billion over 10 years, according to Obama’s 2013 budget. Obama has called for its elimination in his last three budgets.

At a House Budget Committee hearing last week, Yarmuth demanded Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner turn over to lawmakers an analysis examining the costs and benefits of eliminating LIFO. On Friday, Yarmuth said he had yet to receive a response.

Yarmuth said that the administration needs to look at whether the negative effects on smaller industries would actually reduce tax revenue over time.

The LIFO provision is used by more than bourbon makers. Major oil and gas companies frequently employ it as well to reduce their tax burden.

Yarmuth said exemptions for aged products like whiskey, wine and cheese could make sense.

“The American bourbon whiskey industry has been a really positive growth story, despite the uneven economic conditions,” Max Shapira, the president of Heaven Hill said. “Ten years ago, many industry analysts wanted to consign whiskey to the great liquor store in the sky.”

He said that bourbon is facing growing global demand, including in Asia, and that repealing LIFO at this time would hurt the ability of Heaven Hill to grow its exports. The Obama administration is trying to double U.S. exports over a four-year span.

Read the rest here.

OMAHA, Neb. — Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Saturday that he was “dead wrong” with a prediction that the U.S. housing market would begin to recover by now, but he remains optimistic about the nation’s economy.

In his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Buffett said he is sure housing will recover eventually and help bring down the nation’s unemployment rate. But he did not predict when that will happen.

Read the rest here.

CHEYENNE — State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States.

House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government.

The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. David Miller, R-Riverton, has said he doesn’t anticipate any major crises hitting America anytime soon. But with the national debt exceeding $15 trillion and protest movements growing around the country, Miller said Wyoming — which has a comparatively good economy and sound state finances — needs to make sure it’s protected should any unexpected emergency hit the U.S.

Several House members spoke in favor of the legislation, saying there was no harm in preparing for the worst.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in this room today what would come up here and say that this country is in good shape, that the world is stable and in good shape — because that is clearly not the case,” state Rep. Lorraine Quarberg, R-Thermopolis, said. “To put your head in the sand and think that nothing bad’s going to happen, and that we have no obligation to the citizens of the state of Wyoming to at least have the discussion, is not healthy.”

By Fernanda Santos and Sharon Otterman

7:17 p.m. | Updated After a long legal battle and amid much anguish by teachers and other educators, the New York City Education Department released individual performance rankings of 18,000 public school teachers on Friday, while admonishing the news media not to use the scores to label or pillory teachers.

The reports, which name teachers as well as their schools, rank teachers based on their students’ gains on the state’s math and English exams over five years and up until the 2009-10 school year. The city released the reports after the United Federation of Teachers exhausted all legal remedies to block their public disclosure.

The reports are now available on SchoolBook, posted on the individual pages for the elementary and middle schools whose teachers’ ratings were released. You can search for a school by using the search module on the left.

At a briefing on Friday morning, an Education Department official said that over the five years, 521 teachers were rated in the bottom 5 percent for two or more years, and 696 were repeatedly in the top 5 percent.

But citing both the wide margin of error — on average, a teacher’s math score could be 35 percentage points off, or 53 points on the English exam — as well as the limited sample size — some teachers are being judged on as few as 10 students — city education officials said their confidence in the data varied widely from case to case.

“The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever,” said the Education Department’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky. “No principal would ever make a decision on this score alone and we would never invite anyone — parents, reporters, principals, teachers — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone.”

Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott also underscored the need to use the individual rankings cautiously.

“I don’t want our teachers disparaged in any way, and I don’t want our teachers denigrated based on this information,” Mr. Walcott said. “This is very rich data that has evolved over the years. As Shael has indicated, it is old data and it’s just one piece of information. And so I don’t want our teachers characterized in a certain way based on this very complex rich tool that we have available to us.”

Nevertheless, the data is ripe for analysis. One fact shared by the Education Department: Many of the teachers included in the database are no longer working in city schools.

Officials said 77 percent of the 18,000 who received reports were still employed by the Education Department, but of those who remained, many had moved on to administrative jobs or teach subject areas or grade levels that were not included in the reports.

For example, the teacher who was rated most highly, based on his scores for the 2009-10 school year, is now an assistant principal at another school, according to his online profile. His rating encompassed only one year of data and was based on 32 students’ test scores.

The data was handed to the news media on CDs, which contain spreadsheets listing teachers’ scores for the 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years. Roughly 12,000 teachers were given teacher data reports each year.

Charter school and special education teachers were not included; the city says it will likely release their rankings on Tuesday.

The teacher rankings began as a pilot program four years ago to improve instruction in 140 city schools. It has turned into the most controversial set of public school statistics to be released by the Bloomberg administration: individual rankings for roughly 18,000 math and English public school teachers from fourth through eighth grades.

The teachers have already seen their reports, which have been distributed for the past several years. But parents and the rest of the public can now learn how individual teachers performed, based on how they improved their students’ test scores, and with that they will begin the difficult and emotional reckoning of comparing what they personally know about a teacher to what a set of statistics tells them.

In the larger picture, the ratings could bolster or undermine a school’s reputation, and validate or discredit convictions long espoused by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, like his belief that small schools are better than large ones and that length of service is not necessarily a predictor of strong performance in the classroom.

The rankings, known as teacher data reports, are supposed to rate teachers across a performance scale. They are at the core of a national effort to assess, compensate and dismiss teachers based in part on their students’ test results.

In some school districts, the rankings have become an important component in decision-making about teachers. New York City principals have been using the rankings to help make tenure decisions. Houston gave bonuses based on rankings, though the district eventually restructured that program. In the Washington school district, poorly rated teachers have lost their jobs.

New York has become only the second city in the country where teachers’ names and ratings have been publicized. In 2010, The Los Angeles Times published its own set of ratings, in spite of fierce opposition from the local teachers’ union. Thousands of people flocked to the newspaper’s Web site to check the rankings, though, and Arne Duncan, the United States education secretary, praised the effort, saying, “silence is not an option.”

Read the rest here.

By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

At the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran. There is no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power. But the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead — a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb. Iranian officials maintain that their nuclear program is for civilian purposes.

Read the rest here.

2011 Letter to Shareholders

He is regarded as the most famous atheist in the world but last night Professor Richard Dawkins admitted he could not be sure that God does not exist.

Strangely, the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. “People are properly puzzled by the fact that we’re using less gas than we have in years, yet we’re paying more.”

Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” he says. “Each of the last three weeks we’ve seen a record net long position being taken.”

Read the rest here.

Today, without much fanfare, US debt to GDP hit 101% with the latest issuance of $32 billion in 2 Year Bonds. If the moment when this ratio went from double to triple digits is still fresh in readers minds, is because it is: total debt hit and surpassed the most recently revised Q4 GDP on January 30, or just three weeks ago. Said otherwise, it has taken the US 21 days to add a full percentage point to this most critical of debt sustainability ratios: but fear not, with just under $1 trillion in new debt issuance on deck in the next 9 months, we will be at 110% in no time.

Read the rest here.

Live Charts – Crude Oil Chart and Live Oil prices

By Simon Carr

At a public meeting in the Commons, the climate scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT made a number of declarations that unsettle the claim that global warming is backed by “settled science”. They’re not new, but some of them were new to me.

Over the last 150 years CO2 (or its equivalents) has doubled. This has been accompanied by a rise in temperature of seven or eight tenths of a degree centigrade.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change attributes half this increase to human activity.

Lindzen says: “Claims that the earth has been warming, that there is a Greenhouse Effect, and that man’s activity have contributed to warming are trivially true but essentially meaningless.”

He said our natural body temperature varies by eight tenths of a degree.

He showed a Boston newspaper weather graphic for a day – it had the actual temperature against a background of the highest and lowest recorded temperature for that day. The difference was as much as 60 degrees F.

When you double CO2 there’s a two per cent change in the “radiation budget”. Yet two billion years ago, the sun was 20 to 30 per cent dimmer – and the planet’s temperature was about the same.

The Al Gore graph showing CO2 and temperature rising and falling in tandem showed that the release of CO2 from the oceans was prompted by warming, not vice versa.

He gave us a slide with a series of familiar alarms – melting ice caps, disappearing icebergs, receding glaciers, rising sea levels. It was published by the US Weather Bureau in 1922.

And one further element of the consensus: there’s been no increase in temperature for 15 years.

He concluded with an exposition of science that, frankly, I didn’t follow. However, the reliability and explanatory power of climate models was satirised convincingly. And I found myself believing – or accepting the possibility – that warming would reduce rather than increase tropical storms.

He also said that the IPCC needs “positive feedback mechanisms” to justify anything above a one degree C  increase in their predictions. But: “Observation points to small negative feedbacks.”

How to explain the procession of eminent opinion leaders – some even in our own Royal Society – who advance the tenets of catastrophic global warming? “It is science in the service of politics,” he said.

If Lindzen is right, we will never be able to calculate the trillions that have been spent on the advice of “scientists in the service of politics”.

Source

By JAMES KANTER

Published: February 22, 2012

BRUSSELS — During the past decade, the European Union blazed a green trail with a series of laws mandating a low-carbon economy and promises to set an example for other parts of the world.

That now seems like another era.

A succession of economic crises has pushed European governments to pare subsidies to clean-energy sectors like solar power and has undermined initiatives in other areas like energy efficiency, where member states balked at binding targets.

The E.U. Emissions Trading System — the Union’s flagship climate policy, which requires industries to acquire emissions permits — has been battered by extreme volatility, tax fraud, recycling of used credits, suspicions of profiteering and online attacks.

Many factories and utilities also received more free permits than they needed under the system, helping ensure that the price of the permits has never been high enough, for long enough, to push polluters to invest in cleaner alternatives.

The latest complication for Europe’s green agenda is the prospect of trade wars with important partners like the United States and China at a time when the Union can least afford threats to jobs and growth.

The most high-profile dispute focuses on a law requiring all airlines using airports within the Union to join the Emissions Trading System. About 30 governments met in Moscow this week to discuss barring their carriers from participating and other forms of retaliation.

There are other disputes brewing.

Read the rest here.

The correlation between oil prices and equities has fallen to the lowest level since April last year as the Iranian nuclear row and related oil price jump have swooped back onto the radar for global investors.

Until recently equities and oil have tended to move in the direction. Oil price moves have been primarily demand driven  – euro zone credit woes easing and better economic data from the U.S. have been good for oil and equity prices.

If oil prices start to rise due to worries about supply rather than improving growth expect equities to suffer. As the chart below shows the correlation between the two assets went negative last year as investors worried how much the spreading Arab spring may hit oil supply.

To read the rest and see the interesting chart, go here.