Who Just Dumped $220 Million Nasdaq Futures In 1 Second?

At 10:27:21 ET, the Nasdaq 100 e-mini futures contract suddenly dropped on extreme activity as someone decided it was an opportune time to dump 3000 contracts or around $220 million notional. As Nanex notes, the ETF – QQQ – also collapsed (with over 1200 trades in 1 second) as bids and offers were crossed and markets went flash-crashy for a few tenths of a second. The questions is – who was it? Waddell & Reed?

Via Nanex,

1. QQQ Trades (cicles) and NBBO shaded red when crossed (bid > ask), yellow when locked (bid = ask), or gray when normal (bid < ask).
Note how the trades print way ahead of quotes. Chart shows about 140 milliseconds of time.

2. June 2014 Nasdaq 100 (NQ) Futures trades and quote spread.
NQ trades in Chicago – comparing the activity to the QQQ's traded in NY, we see that NQ futures initiated the drop. QQQ's reacted about 4 milliseconds later – the time it takes light to travel between the two cities.

3. Nasdaq non-ISO trades (dots) and quote spread (shading).
ISO trades can appear slightly ahead of quotes, so we only show non-ISO trades. These trades should appear after quotes: the dots should be on or to the right of the gray shading.

4. Nasdaq and BATS non-ISO trades and quotes.
We can see that Nasdaq quotes are lagging BATS quotes: the gray shading (Nasdaq quote spread) appears offset to the right of the pink shading (BATS quote spread). This tells us that some of the delay was caused BEFORE Nasdaq quotes reached the SIP. Because Nasdaq trades appear ahead of Nasdaq quotes (and BATS trades), we know direct feeds got that information faster than the SIP did. We call this condition fantaseconds.