JPMorgan has new theory about what really caused the flash rally

Some 16 months after the “flash rally” in U.S. Treasuries blindsided Wall Street traders, little about what exactly went wrong has been resolved. The most common, albeit tenuous, explanation is that the futures market seized up that morning, creating a spillover effect into cash bonds that led to a frenetic 12-minute spike in prices.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts are now advancing a new theory, one they contend is a key to how to trade most effectively in today’s volatile Treasuries market. The problems on Oct. 15, 2014, actually began in the cash market, the analysts led by Joshua Younger said in a note this week.

Among the evidence they cite is the fact that it was much easier to trade in the futures market that day, a trend that continues now and makes futures the place that they and other big players say investors should turn when looking to trade the Treasuries market.

“The data suggest the cash market broke first,” Younger said in a phone interview Thursday. “Futures were playing catch-up, to some extent.”

The ongoing analysis of what happened that day illuminates recent shifts in the mechanics of the $13.2 trillion market that have made its derivatives relatively easier to trade, according to Younger and his colleagues. Since the financial crisis, overnight financing markets have gotten crunched, regulations have shrunk bank balance sheets and a disconnect has grown between investors, who often trade over the phone one-on-one with dealers, and ultra-fast market makers trading on central platforms. It typically requires more capital to trade in bonds than to transact in futures.

Tougher trading

Those changes are in the spotlight as the Treasury Department conducts its first significant review of the market in almost two decades after asking participants on Jan. 19 for comments about liquidity.

Some big names back JPMorgan’s view that it’s often tougher to trade Treasury securities in the roughly $500 billion-a-day cash market than the derivatives that track them. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York touched on the topic in a recent blog post. Sam Priyadarshi, head of fixed-income derivatives trading at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard Group Inc., the largest private holder of Treasuries, says the relative ease is encouraging his team to trade more in futures. His team trades Treasuries for some of the firm’s active portfolios.

The JPMorgan analysts looked at measures of trading activity and the depth of the markets’ liquidity to determine the source of the steep drop in yields in October 2014. They found that shortly before the decline, volume in 10-year Treasury notes spiked. In contrast, trading volume in 10-year futures contracts only peaked after the note’s yield had plummeted to its low for that day, they said. They also found that, in futures, average transaction costs were lower, and distribution of market depth across the order book was more stable.

“Even after more than a year, the events of October 15, 2014, remain seared in the market’s collective memory,” the analysts wrote. “It remains an invaluable laboratory for what can go wrong — and increasingly does these days.”

Younger pointed to Feb. 11, when the 10-year Treasury yield slid to intraday lows around 1.53 percent — the lowest in more than three years — before rebounding within roughly an hour.

“That lesser breakdown looks similar in many ways to October 15, 2014, with cash volumes elevated relative to futures around the lows in yield,” the analysts wrote.

Recent regulations make it less profitable for bond dealers to hold U.S. debt on their balance sheets. Yet nearly all investors need to go to a dealer to trade it, according to a Feb. 12 blog post from the New York Fed.