{"id":2907,"date":"2008-01-24T14:19:08","date_gmt":"2008-01-24T18:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloggie.org\/proggold\/2008\/01\/24\/it-would-explains-so-much\/"},"modified":"2008-01-24T14:20:49","modified_gmt":"2008-01-24T18:20:49","slug":"it-would-explains-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/2008\/01\/24\/it-would-explains-so-much\/","title":{"rendered":"It would explains so much"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nNot sure how reliable this interview with a hedge fund manager<\/a> (Found at Ken’s<\/a>) is, but it has one of the more funny and scary explanations of how the whole stock marker went to the shitter:\n<\/p>\n

\nPeople actually call it \u201cblack box trading,\u201d because sometimes you don\u2019t even know why the black box is doing what it\u2019s doing, because the whole idea is that if you could, you should be doing it yourself. But it\u2019s something that\u2019s done on such a big scale, a universe of several thousand stocks, that a human brain can\u2019t do it in real time. The problem is that the DNA of a lot of these models is very, very similar, it\u2019s like an ecosystem with no biodiversity because most of the people who do stat-arb can trace their lineage, their intellectual lineage, back to four or five guys who really started the whole black box trading discipline in the \u201970s and \u201980s. And what happened is, in August, a few of these funds that have big black box trading books suffered losses in other businesses and they decided to reduce risk, so they basically dialed down the black box system. So the black box system started unwinding its positions, and every black box is so similar that everybody was kind of long the same stocks and short the same stocks. So when one fund starts selling off its longs and buying back its shorts, that causes losses for the next black box and the people who run that black box say, \u201cOh gosh! I\u2019m losing a lot more money than I thought I could. My risk model is no longer relevant; let me turn down my black box.\u201d And basically what you had was an avalanche where everybody\u2019s black box is being shut off, causing incredibly bizarre behavior in the market.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not sure how reliable this interview with a hedge fund manager (Found at Ken’s) is, but it has one of the more funny and scary explanations of how the whole stock marker went to the shitter: People actually call it \u201cblack box trading,\u201d because sometimes you don\u2019t even know why the black box is doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it-is-not-a-magic-pixie-dust","category-life-under-capitalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2907\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/proggold\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}