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Why I Avoid Using Stop-Loss Orders

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I haven’t been posting here for a while because I have been busy writing about the stock market at the Wall Street Sector Selector website.

Within three months after I first started this blog, I began criticizing the permissive attitude taken by the Securities and Exchange Commission toward predatory securities trading tactics.

Since that time absolutely nothing has changed.  In fact, the SEC has allowed the stock market to become an even more dangerous place for “retail investors” (mom and pop) to keep their life savings.

The use of “limit orders” has become a joke.  The only reason for using a limit order is to let your enemies (the predatory traders) know the maximum extent to which you will allow yourself to be screwed on a trade.  Since July of 2009, I have discussed the threat posed to retail investors by the use of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) systems.  Computers – programmed with predatory algorithms – can engage in “computerized front-running” through the use of “flash orders” to force your own limit order to be executed at its most extreme expense to you.  I discussed this situation in more detail on May 18, 2010.

I rarely use “stop loss” orders.  They are used by investors to limit their loss if a stock price sinks.  The investor specifies a stop price (based on a percentage of the purchase price which is the maximum amount the investor is willing to lose on the stock).  If the stock eventually drops to the price in the stop order, the transaction is initiated and the order goes out to the exchange as a market order – to be filled at the best available price at the time.  In other words, there is no guarantee that the order will be filled at the price specified in the stop order.  In the “flash crash” on May 6 of 2010, many investors lost their shirts because their stop orders were executed and by the time the investors tried to repurchase the stocks, the prices rebounded to where they were before the flash crash.  Worse yet, by the time their stop orders were actually filled, the stock prices had dropped tremendously.  Not only did those investors lose money on the stop orders for no good reason – but many chose to buy back their stocks at the pre-crash prices.  As a result, they lost twice as much money just because of an emotional attachment to the stock.  (Emotional attachment to a particular stock is a bad investment habit.)  Since that time, a number of “mini flash crashes” have been engineered by predatory traders on particular stocks, forcing investors off their positions to take losses, which ultimately benefit the predators, who use stealthy tactics to reap those profits without being caught.

Maureen Farrell recently wrote an interesting piece for CNNMoney about the consequences of  “mini flash crashes”.  Here is some of what she had to say:

Stock exchanges have explicit rules for canceling “clearly erroneous trades” and for triggering so-called circuit breakers that halt trading.  None of the trades mentioned in this story met that criteria.

Generally, trades can be canceled if they fall 5% to 10% from the last trade, but the rules vary, depending on the market cap of a company and its trading volume.

Investors still have to notify the exchange within 30 minutes if they want their trade to be canceled.

And because many of the wild swings aren’t extreme enough to be considered “clearly erroneous,” individual investors may not even be aware that certain trades are being executed.

Although the article noted that “(t)he SEC continues to make changes to try to combat the frequency and impact of the mini flash crashes”, there is apparently nothing being done by the SEC to prevent the predatory engineering of those crashes.  The SEC is apparently doing nothing to allow investors to unwind trades triggered by those crashes.  More important, the SEC is doing nothing to track down and prosecute the culprits responsible for engineering and profiteering from these events.

Wall Street needs a new Sheriff.


 

The Home Stretch

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October 27, 2008

We are entering the final week of the longest Presidential campaign in our nation’s history.  At the same time, the world economy continues to flirt with chaos and our nation’s equities market indices are diving at a faster pace than Superman’s swooping down from the sky to save Lois Lane from a potential rapist.  Some stockbrokers believe that an abrupt and decisive nosedive in the markets might have a cathartic effect and finally bring us to the long-awaited “bottom”, from which there would be only one place to go:  up.  Rock musician Tom Petty wrote a song about the death of his mother, called: Free Fallin’.  That song has recently become the theme for America’s stock markets.  The situation has become so bad that many fear it may be necessary for the feds to suspend equities trading until all of the nervous investors and frenzied hedge fund managers have a chance to gather their wits.  Would the government really intervene and close the stock markets for a day or more?

There is one authority who earned quite a bit of “street cred” when our current economic crisis hit the fan.  He is Nouriel Roubini, an economist at the Stern School of Business at New York University.  He earned the nickname “Doctor Doom” when he spoke before the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on September 7, 2006 and described, in precise detail, exactly what would bring the financial world to its knees, two years later.  As reported by Ben Sills and Emma Ross-Thomas in the October 24 edition of Bloomberg:

Roubini said yesterday that policy makers may need to shut down financial markets for a week or two as investors dump assets. Trading in futures on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was limited today after declines of more than 6 percent.

This week brings us more earnings reports and new housing starts that could send already skittish investors (as well as terrified hedge fund managers) on a “panic selling” binge.  Could this trigger a market shutdown by the government as predicted by Dr. Roubini?  If so, we may find the markets closed for the final days before the Presidential election.  The Republicans and their media trumpet, Fox News, would likely seize upon such a development, characterizing it as validation of their claim that the investing public fears a “socialist” Obama Presidency.  In reality, there would be no way to measure the impact of the election results on the equities markets under such circumstances.  If the markets were kept closed until after the election, there would be quite a number of investors, chomping at the bit to dump their portfolios during the hiatus, ready to do so as soon as the markets re-opened.  On the other hand, Stuart Schweitzer, global market strategist at JP Morgan Private Bank appeared on the October 24 broadcast of the PBS program, Nightly Business Report, and explained what to really expect about the impact of the Presidential election on the securities markets.  Schweitzer believes that regardless of who is elected, once we get past Election Day, there will be a sense of certainty established as to who will be making economic policy going forward into the new Presidential term.  This fact in itself, regardless of what that economic policy might become, will eliminate the element of uncertainty that breeds some degree of the fear in the hearts of investors.

If the stock markets really end up being closed during the final days before the election, we would likely see more havoc than calming.  The timing would prove too irresistible for conspiracy theorists to ignore.  Some would see it as a plot by the Republicans to conceal how bad the economy really is.  Others might see it as a ploy by “Washington elites” (a term used by some in reference to Obama supporters) to conceal widespread fear of putting a “communist” in charge of our nation.  The smartest course from here would be for the Federal Reserve Board’s FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) to undertake a responsible, public relations role when it meets on Tuesday.  They should be ready to explain to the public what has really been happening in the markets:  an unregulated species of investments called “hedge funds” has been causing mayhem on the trading floors.  Many (if not most) of these hedge funds are going broke and they are attempting to secure a place in the line for Federal bailout money.  They have caused equities trading to function more like eBay:  the only market movement that matters over the course of any given day is what takes place during the final three minutes before the closing bell, when the hedge fund managers dump stocks.  On eBay, the winning bid for an item is usually made during the minute before an auction ends.  Unlike eBay, the stock market numbers can go up or down.  These days, the index movement prior to the closing bell is usually seismic (in one direction or the other).   It was never like this before.  These trading patterns often trigger pre-established “stop loss orders” to sell stocks, usually established by individual investors upon purchase of those stocks.  The result is an avalanche of “sell” orders at the end of the day.  The FOMC needs to explain this disease to the public and let us know the Fed is working on a cure.  Closing the markets in the final days before a Presidential election will not be a cure.  Such a move will just create a scab that will quickly be picked away by an investing public that needs to ease up on the caffeine and go out for a walk.