Nanex Research
Nanex ~ 05-Jul-2013 ~ The NY-ARCA Dark Pool
Dark Pools report trades, but not quotes.
On July 5, 2013 between 7:20 and 8:42:50, quotes from NY-ARCA (PACF) stopped in dozens
of stocks, most notably large ETFs such as SPY and IWM. The charts below show
quotes and trades from all exchanges in the symbol SPY. At 8:30, during the NY-ARCA
quote outage, two important news items (Employment
Situation and
Jobless Claims) were released. Prices in SPY and
other symbols (gold for example) were extremely volatile right before the news release.
Although quotes from NY-ARCA stopped, trade reports from that exchange continued as
if nothing happened. This indicates the problem was with NY-ARCA sending quotes to the Consolidated Feed. Since trading continued, we know that direct feed (ArcaBook) customers weren't
affected. By the way, this is a violation of Reg NMS, which prohibits exchanges from
sending core information (time, price, size, etc.) to a direct feed faster than to the
consolidated.
The charts show the NY-ARCA quote stoppage and its influence
on prices from other
exchanges and dark pools.
Note: charts use the mnemonic PACF to indicated NY-ARCA.
See also Gold Oscillations and
Jumping the Gun which document unusual behavior in gold and
emini futures during this period of time.
Spreadsheet of 1,358 trades in 99 symbols (worth $20.9 million)
from NY-ARCA that appear to have been reported late. These trades were grouped and sent
in 2 batches: at 8:22:16 and 8:28:29. It is possible the second batch influenced a trading
frenzy (5000 contracts in a second) in the eMini futures -
click for charts.
Nanex Research
Inquiries: pr@nanex.net