Message of the market

Joe Saluzzi tried to get the word out. He really did make a good faith effort. This was one of his numerous appearances on Bloomberg, Fox Business News, CBS etc. The mainstream news media did not ignore him. He was interviewed for about 10 minutes in each station's Manhattan studio. Each appearance was broadcast live. Receiving that much air time is unusual.

Joe Saluzzi comments on problems with the stock market

The temporal backdrop for this interview was particularly good. I enjoyed watching the market tickers running across the screen. They were triple stacked, and occupied a lot of screen real-estate! The results of a New York State election were reported around the 5 minute mark. I am no longer familiar enough with the NY-NJ-CT area to gauge the significance, but phrases like, "concedes the election" are portentous.

I've followed Sal Arnuk, @ThemisSal on Twitter, since 2012. He is Joe Saluzzi's business partner at Themis Trading. That isn't how I found this video. Rather, I was reading an Amazon book review, about one of Ernest Chen's algorithmic trading books. That led me to R. Ryley's Message of the Markets blog.

The following excerpt is from an anonymous comment on Ryley's blog post, faithfully reproduced here under Creative Commons License by-NC-ND and replete with all-cap's

YES. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS CLIP IN THE PAST SIX MONTHS. THE THEFT OF GOLDMAN SACHS' MICROSECOND TRADING CODE HAS FURTHER REINFORCED THIS MAN'S COMMENTS... [Such] CODE* CAN BE USED TO UNFAIRLY MANIPULATE THE MARKET IN A WAY THAT GIVES AN UNFAIR ADVANTAGE TO WHOMEVER POSSESSES IT... THEN FACTOR IN THAT 49% OF MARKET ACTIVITY IS PROGRAM [trading], WE KNOW THAT THE IMPACT...IS MATERIAL. IN OTHER WORDS, MANY MARKET PARTICIPANTS, INCLUDING RETAILERS, ARE BEING CHEATED.

In retrospect, it doesn't seems so strange, e.g. US Taxpayers Pay For SEC to Arrange Early Release of Data to High Speed Trading Firms.

* I am not certain, but believe that Anonymous refers to the circumstances that led to former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov's conviction in 2011.