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Full Discussion: Algorithmic Terrorism
Special Forums News, Links, Events and Announcements Complex Event Processing RSS News Algorithmic Terrorism Post 302442435 by Linux Bot on Wednesday 4th of August 2010 08:15:02 AM
Old 08-04-2010
Algorithmic Terrorism
John Bates
08-04-2010 08:09 AM
At the CFTC's first Technology Advisory Council meeting on July 14,there was concern expressed around the concept of quote-stuffing. There wassome evidence presented that the May 6th flash crash may have been caused by orexacerbated by this activity. While with regard to the flashcrash, other marketexperts I've spoken to know dispute this was the cause, quote-stuffing is atopic worthy of discussion

 

At the CFTC meeting, where I was an invited participant, data waspresented from trade database development firm Nanex, which suggested quotestuffing contributed to the destabilization on May 6th. In this casethe data suggests huge numbers of quotes were fired into the market onparticular symbols (as many as 5000 per second) and that many of these wereoutside the national best bid/offer (NBBO). So what's the point of this? Wellwith latency as a key weapon, one possibility is that the generating traderscan ignore these quotes while the rest of the market has to process and respondto them - giving an advantage to the initiator. Even more cynically one canconsider these quotes misleading or even destabilizing the market. In fact,Nanex state in their paper: "What we discovered was a manipulative devicewith destabilizing effect". Quote stuffing may be innocent or an honestmistake, but Nanex's graphs tell a very interesting tale (http://www.nanex.net/FlashCrash/CCircleDay.html).There are patterns detected - on a regular basis - that one could conclude isquote stuffing for the purpose of market manipulation.

 

At the extreme, quote-stuffing could operate like a “denial ofservice attack” - firing so many orders that the market can't cope - andcrippling the trading of certain symbols, certain exchanges or the wholemarket. An influx of orders in sudden bursts to one exchange on one stock canslow down that system as it tries to process these orders. Nanex notes thatthere are 4,000 stocks listed on the NYSE and nine other reporting exchanges inthe U.S. If each reporting exchange for each stock quoted at 5,000 quotes persecond it would equal 180.0 million quotes per second. A daunting task nomatter how advanced their processing technology is.

 

Without trying to overstate the issue, in the most extremecircumstances these practices could be considered algorithmic terrorism. Onecan imagine how, at the extreme, it is potentially catastrophic. The concern isthat a well-funded terrorist organization might use such tactics in the futureto manipulate or cripple the market. So much of our economy is underpinned byelectronic trading - so protecting the market is more important than guardingFort Knox! Regulators, such as the CFTC and SEC are taking this seriously - andneed to respond.



Source...
 

LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

fntsample

fntsample(1)						      General Commands Manual						      fntsample(1)

NAME

       fntsample - PDF and PostScript font samples generator

SYNOPSIS

       fntsample [ OPTIONS ] -f FONT-FILE -o OUTPUT-FILE
       fntsample -h

DESCRIPTION

       fntsample  program  can	be  used  to generate font samples that show Unicode coverage of the font and are similar in appearance to Unicode
       charts. Samples can be saved into PDF (default) or PostScript file.

OPTIONS

       fntsample supports the following options.

       --font-file, -f FONT-FILE
	      Make samples of FONT-FILE.

       --font-index, -n IDX
	      Font index for FONT-FILE specified using --font-file option.  Useful for files that contain multiple fonts,  like  TrueType  Collec-
	      tions (.ttc).  By default font with index 0 is used.

       --output-file, -o OUTPUT-FILE
	      Write output to OUTPUT-FILE.

       --other-font-file, -d OTHER-FONT
	      Compare FONT-FILE with OTHER-FONT.  Glyphs added to FONT-FILE will be highlighted.

       --other-index, -m IDX
	      Font index for OTHER-FONT specified using --other-font-file option.

       --postscript-output, -s
	      Use PostScript format for output instead of PDF.

       --svg, -g
	      Use SVG format for output.  The generated document contains one page.  Use range selection options to specify which.

       --print-outline, -l
	      Print  document  outlines data to standard output.  This data can be used to add outlines (aka bookmarks) to resulting PDF file with
	      pdfoutline program.

       --include-range, -i RANGE
	      Show characters in RANGE.

       --exclude-range, -x RANGE
	      Do not show characters in RANGE.

       --style, -t "STYLE: VAL"
	      Set STYLE to value VAL.  Run fntsample with option --help to see list of styles and default values.

       --help, -h
	      Display help text and exit.

       Parameter RANGE for -i and -x can be given as one integer or a pair of integers delimited by minus sign (-).  Integers can be specified	in
       decimal,  hexadecimal  (0x...) or octal (0...) format.  One integer of a pair can be missing (-N can be used to specify all characters with
       codes less or equal to N, and N- for all characters with codes greather or equal to N).	Multiple -i and -x options can be used.

EXAMPLES

       Make PDF samples for font.ttf and write them to file samples.pdf:
	      fntsample -f font.ttf -o samples.pdf

       Make PDF samples for font.ttf, compare it with oldfont.ttf and highlight new glyphs. Write output to file samples.pdf:
	      fntsample -f font.ttf -d oldfont.ttf -o samples.pdf

       Make PostScript samples for font.ttf and write output to file samples.ps.  Show only glyphs for characters with	codes  less  or  equal	to
       U+04FF but exclude U+0370-U+03FF:
	      fntsample -f font.ttf -s -o samples.ps -i -0x04FF -x 0x0370-0x03FF

       Make PDF samples for font.ttf and save output to file samples.pdf adding outlines to it:
	      fntsample -f font.ttf -o temp.pdf -l > outlines.txt
	      pdfoutline temp.pdf outlines.txt samples.pdf

AUTHOR

       Copyright (C) 2007 Eugeniy Meshcheryakov <eugen@debian.org>
       Homepage: <http://fntsample.sourceforge.net/>

SEE ALSO

       pdfoutline(1)

								    2010-10-14							      fntsample(1)
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