Victor Niederhoffer Thinks He Caused The Stock Market Crash Of 1997
by ilene - June 23rd, 2010 1:35 am
Victor Niederhoffer Thinks He Caused The Stock Market Crash Of 1997
Courtesy of Courtney Comstock at Clusterstock
Victor Niederhoffer thinks he caused the stock market crash of October 27, 1997, when the DOW dropped over 550 points.
In an interview with Slate Magazine, Nierhoffer explains his theory:
They all knew that if I was hurting in one market, I’d have to liquidate in the other markets.
Whenever someone’s in trouble, it circulates around Wall Street; you’d be amazed how just one small fish is enough to stop the wheels of commerce for long enough to relieve that person of his funds. And then the market goes back to doing exactly what it was going to do beforehand.
I still think that the crash of Oct. 27, 1997, was basically due to brokers running my position against me, knowing that I was on the ropes. The market had its greatest drop in the previous 10 years that day. And then the next day, once they were able to force me out, it went up more than it dropped.
Let’s compare his hypothesis with what some other financial experts think caused the crash.
Bernanke
Bernanke says that October is just a crazy month for the markets.
“Classically, October has always been the month for financial problems,” Mr. Bernanke told the WSJ in 2007.
Krugman
The Asian markets were overvalued and the bubble burst - (Urbi Garay’s paper on the crisis)
Malcolm Gladwell
He sold a very large number of options on the S. & P. index, taking millions of dollars from other traders in exchange for promising to buy a basket of stocks from them at current prices, if the market ever fell.
It was an unhedged bet, or what was called on Wall Street a "naked put," meaning that he bet everyone on one outcome: he bet in favor of the large probability of making a small amount of money, and against the small probability of losing a large amount of money-and he lost. On October 27, 1997, the market plummeted eight per cent, and all of the many, many people who had bought those options from Niederhoffer came calling all at once, demanding that he buy back their stocks at pre-crash prices.
He ran through a hundred and thirty million dollars — his cash reserves, his savings, his other stocks — and when his…
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Did a Big Bet Help Trigger ‘Black Swan’ Stock Swoon?
by ilene - May 11th, 2010 3:39 pm
I wouldn’t call this a "black swan" event any more than Jon Stewart would call it a "perfect storm." Felix Salmon - it’s a silly theory – Nassim Taleb Didn’t Cause the Crash makes a better argument below. – Ilene
Did a Big Bet Help Trigger ‘Black Swan’ Stock Swoon?
By SCOTT PATTERSON And TOM LAURICELLA, WSJ
Shortly after 2:15 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, hedge fund Universa Investments LP placed a big bet in the Chicago options trading pits that stocks would continue their sharp declines.
On any other day, this $7.5 million trade for 50,000 options contracts might have briefly hurt stock prices, though not caused much of a ripple. But coming on a day when all varieties of financial markets were deeply unsettled, the trade may have played a key role in the stock-market collapse just 20 minutes later.
The trade by Universa, a hedge fund advised by Nassim Taleb, author of "Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable," led traders on the other side of the transaction—including Barclays Capital, the brokerage arm of British bank Barclays PLC—to do their own selling to offset some of the risk, according to traders in Chicago.
Then, as the market fell, those declines are likely to have forced even more "hedging" sales, creating a tsunami of pressure that spread to nearly all parts of the market.
The tidal wave of selling fed into a market already on edge about the economy in Europe. As the selling spread, a blast of orders appears to have jarred the flow of data going into brokerage firms, such as Barclays Capital, according to people familiar with the matter…
Nassim Taleb Didn’t Cause the Crash
By Felix Salmon
Of all the silly theories about the cause of Thursday’s stock-market plunge, I’m not entirely sure why the WSJ has decided to give particular credence to the idea that it can all be traced back to a single $7.5 million trade for 50,000 options contracts. Lots of options trades of that size take place every day, and just because this one happened just before the market fell doesn’t mean it was the cause of the crash.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that the crash was fundamentally the fault of weak market structures, especially in the smaller electronic exchanges. It wasn’t a fat finger, it wasn’t cyberterrorism, it wasn’t the sale of 16 billion
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site