etfmsolutions: Robots Skew the Game....02.04.15

Wednesday, February 4, 2015

Robots Skew the Game....02.04.15

After see-sawing off and on the pivot for most of the day we finally got a channel break to the upside in the last 60 minutes and it looked like we were destined for R1 or better by day's end.
THEN....the market demonstrated Murphy's Law as the robots kicked in and wiped out the day's gains in twenty minutes with over 20% of the day's total volume. That was a freight train you did not want to be standing in front off and lots of stop orders got blown through (not LM and M3s) although we did close our positions via a late minute ALERT thereby avoiding the after hours plunge.
With the robots and algorithmic trading accounting for over 70 % of daily volume (the last 20 minutes today was probably about 90%) it often feels like the deck is stacked against the average retail trader as well as many money managers trading off non-algorithmic daily models.
Just for fun...the answer to last night's final question on JEOPARDY was '"algorithm", derived from the name of a ninth century Arab mathematician. Betcha didn't know that.

Chart courtesy of SCHWAB EDGE platform

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