Algorithmic Trading Rapidly Replacing Need For Humans 331
DMandPenfold writes "Algorithmic trading, also known as high frequency trading (HFT), is rapidly replacing human decision making, according to a UK government panel which warned that the right regulations need to be introduced to protect stock markets. Around one third of share trading in the UK is conducted by computers fulfilling commands based on complex algorithms, said the Foresight panel in a working paper published yesterday. Nevertheless, this proportion is significantly lower than in the U.S., where three-quarters of equity dealing is computer generated. The Foresight panel, led by Dame Clara Furse, the former chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, argued that there are both benefits and severe risks to algorithmic trading. There was 'no direct evidence' that the computer trading in itself increased volatility, it said, but in specific circumstances it was possible for a series of events with 'undesired interactions and outcomes' to occur and cause massive damage."
clever humans can introduce "black swans" (Score:2)
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Only if they work for the right people. Otherwise they'll be arrested and thrown in jail.
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Then the algorithm corrects for that after seeing it once.
You, coming up with a "plan" 10 seconds after reading an article -- you can't outthink people who are employed to come up with ideas for improving how the computer thinks.
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Nope. Dedicated amateurs often do better than the professionals. http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/20/when-it-comes-to-forecasting-apples-earnings-amateurs-are-bett/ [engadget.com]
The professionals also tend to have blind spots ...
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SMBC (Score:2)
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2362#comic [smbc-comics.com]
It's all just busy work.
Absolutely (Score:3, Interesting)
As someone who worked at Goldman Sachs, I can completely attest to this; a lot of the software was automated, but what the trading group was always asking for was basically an autopilot system; they wanted to sit back and just let the money roll in. One of them, I remember it distinctly, said that he'd love it if he didn't have to watch all the various windows all the time because he "had better things to do".
This was the same group of guys who, one of them told me "if I could kill you, not get caught, and make money because if it...I wouldn't think twice".
Fun times...
so SkyNet is really a Wall Street computer? (Score:3)
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Intelligence, artificial or otherwise, would be welcome on Wall Street right now.
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Thanks for not understanding how evolution, or the mind for that matter, works.
We have facilities for communication and self-identity largely as a result of being hunters -- being able to "run a model" of our prey in our minds was massively useful. This structure then got applied to the self, and so the ego was born. (This is one of the currently en vogue evolutionary explanations for the rise of consciousness -- obviously not a subject you can create causal experiments to test easily).
What evolutionary p
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Ok, here's one option. You write N herustics and M algorithms (not the same things, guys) and you apply the following rules. (To make it easier to read, I'll use "program" to refer to any herustic or algorithm. This is assumed to cover any implementation, including neural nets, genetic algorithms, ELIZA bots, etc.)
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Read "Wealth" by Robert Reed.
This is bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
HFT does not help the market in any way. It does not promote the investing of capital. Going into and out of a company in less than a second is ridiculous. Steps need to be taken to stop HFT in its tracks before the whole market is ruined.
This will fix HFT:
1. random delay in all trades.. stick a 100ms to 1000ms delay before all trades are posted on the market
2. tax all trades by a miniscule percentage.. give straight to government debt
3. enact a rule that all trades stand.. erroneous trades made by a computer algorithm will never get rolled back
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Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
I Googled it. Here's a report about what some researchers think:
http://www.tradersnarrative.com/what-if-hft-is-actually-good-for-the-market-4723.html [tradersnarrative.com]
"That public perception may need to be adjusted according to this recent research by finance PhD candidate, Jonathan Brogaard (Kellogg). The paper looks at the effect of HFT on equity markets and through analysing the strategies used by these firms it considers their profitability, impact on market liquidity and volatility.
There is evidence that high frequency trading contributes to price discovery and liquidity. There is also evidence that it has a minimal impact on volatility and may even reduce it. There is also no evidence that they engage in front-running. HFT demand for liquidity (42.7%) is slightly higher than their supply of liquidity (41.1%) and they provide the inside quote about 65% of the time."
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with studies like that, and much of the analysis of the stock market, is that it's all done on the numbers. The researchers may be absolutely correct in their study. However, what the current state of the stock market does do is encourage the "wrong" state of mind for many businesses. It's my belief that going public ruins more companies than it helps for exactly this reason (this would be a human study not a numbers study). People start making decisions based on what they thing the investors want that quarter. And to me, that's the surest way to kill a business, as you've now taken away from your focus on your customers and your employees. So while HFT may increase liquidity and all that good stuff, it's doing so at the cost of the long term health of the company. (Not all businesses fall into this of course, but it appears to be more common than not).
I may not be a serious day trader, but as an (albiet modest) investor, I want a company that thinks long term. And it's my understanding the stock market was originally created for investment purposes. What sort of "investment" is it to put money into company for a second or even a day or a week? I actually think the time window for making trades should be more like one a month or even a quarter or maybe twice a year. With a longer period between trades, I understand people may feel uneasy about the commitment, but I think that's exactly what it should mean to "invest." However, if it's a big enough deal to people, then perhaps you could also have a (shorter) window for backing out (with perhaps a small penalty).
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That is possibly the best fair criticism I've read about HFT yet. But it's only incidental: You say that market liquidity is bad for business, because it causes short-termism. And HFT makes the market better at what is does, so HFT is incrementally damaging for business.
Well, you may be right about short-termism, but I believe the discussion mainly centered on whether HFT was good for the stock market. I agree for some firms quarterly announcements create an incentive that isn't so great for them, but those
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The empirical impact of HFTs on market behavior and non-HFT traders has been studied, the following paper for example:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1641387 [ssrn.com]
From the abstract: "These findings suggest that HFTs' activities are not detrimental to non-HFTs and that HFT tends to improve market q
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This is in line with the findings of most serious studies. The intuitions of most laymen fail them because they do not understand market dynamics.
The layman explanation for the market is "One person gets richer off another idiot getting poorer." I get rich by selling my overvalued shit to some tard and then buying some undervalued shit from some other tard. Those guys lose money buying high and selling low. Long positions work one way, buy low from idiot who is undervaluing and sell high to idiot who is overvaluing; short positions work by selling high to idiot who is overvaluing and then buying low back from him after he's lost money. As the ma
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Do you want to explain how they skim this money? I have yet to see anyone come up with an example that had anything to do with market reality.
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Re:This is bullshit. (Score:4, Informative)
This is not possible in all markets, and is definitely fishy. But also, because most markets do not allow this, it is not the main business of HFT traders.
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The response you'll get from actual economists will depend on who is paying them.
HFT is in its essence neither good nor bad, but it has various issues. As it currently works it does allow manipulation of values by allowing fake offers that are withdrawn as soon as they're made. They can often see orders before most humans and 'cheat', but that in itself is not exactly 'evil'.
They provide some liquidity, but that liquidity will probably be gone faster than anyone can react in a situation where it would actua
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I think I agree with this. (I'd like to see a counter-argument if anyone has one.) The one nuance is that I doubt the last one would make much difference... whereas the others are constantly active (and clearly need to be dealt with by traders continuously), the latter is more of a "catastrophic execution" penalty that might be ignored for years, and when it does come into play, maybe the business just declares bankruptcy or gets a government bailout.
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If they get a bailout, that's a problem with politicians, not the market!
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Someone wants to buy and sell the same stock in the same second. What's wrong with that? He's got his investment strategy, you have yours.
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What's not free about it? You're not prevented from doing it...
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If, by law, you mean someone is not prevented from doing it, then you are correct.
However, to become a HFT there are a number of substantial barriers to entry you have to overcome. Not the least of which is that many of the privately held markets require you to buy a seat on them. The price of a seat on the NYSE is currently four million dollars. Not exactly change you can find in the sofa cushions. And then there is the capital outlay for the computer systems, the rental for where to house them, the fiber
Re:This is bullshit. (Score:4, Interesting)
In communism, the government holds reins on the market and dictates activity.
In free-market capitalism, big money holders find ways to hold reins on the market and dictate activity.
Communism is arguably better, except that it's really identical aside from trading "vicious, self-serving market leaders" for "brain dead, incompetent market leaders." It turns out putting idiots in charge is just as bad as putting tyrants in charge.
It is thus sensible that we would occasionally look at a situation, knee jerk "That's Not Fair(TM)," and then calmly and rationally begin to investigate the unfairness to determine if we can make it fair without doing too much damage. Every time we try to regulate something, there is a cost ... but there are already economic costs, like the out-of-control prices of college tuition and books, or the decoupling of rental property rates from rental operating costs (if there is more money in the area, rent prices go up and the poor get pushed out--in other words, it will always be expensive to live decently, and the middle class will likely continue to shrink while the poverty line continues to raise). Fixing any of these things is dangerous; they're already broken, but you can do far worse.
HFT is one of these things. It has an economic cost I'm not very interested in (I dislike the practice, but not on any specifically well researched basis), but to regulate it away would also have economic costs. You have to determine if those costs are in excess of the social and economic value gained by eliminating HFT before you even begin to regulate it.
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Keep your winnings if you win, get your money back if you lose. What a deal for the big firms.
Don't forget 'get bailed out by the taxpayer when you really screw up'.
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3. enact a rule that all trades stand.. erroneous trades made by a computer algorithm will never get rolled back
THIS. It is total bullshit that if your computer fucks up massively you get a rollback. Keep your winnings if you win, get your money back if you lose. What a deal for the big firms.
I think the HFT people would be the first to support this rule.
Remember the "flash crash"? From what I understand the reason the market went into freefall was that a lot of the HFT folk pulled out of the market when they though there was a risk their trades would be reversed. So they turned of their computers and the liquidity they added to the market disappeared. Result... market goes into freefall.
Bonus (Score:2)
So what happens when the algorithms start demanding a billion dollar bonus before they'll turn up to work?
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Then you unplug the self-aware machine.
Additional regulations (Score:5, Interesting)
Algorithmic trading, also known as high frequency trading (HFT), is rapidly replacing human decision making, according to a UK government panel which warned that the right regulations need to be introduced to protect stock markets
Like making it illegal [slashdot.org] for humans to beat the algorithms?
Awesome... (Score:5, Insightful)
The company worth truly investing in, in the sense that you hope it survives and hope it continues to grow as opposed to only making you lots of money, is the one that will treat the environment, their employees, their supply chain, and their customers with respect while paying investors and owners a respectable return.
HFT algorithms don't give a fuck about any of that, exactly like the stereotypical Wall Street broker doesn't care about any of that; in fact HFT algorithms were written when brokers realized they could make more money in corrupting and managing young mathematicians than in doing their own jobs. HFT just further emphasizes empty, short-term speculation without regard to the product sold, the behavior of the company, or the future potential of the company. It enables the irresponsible greed of people who just want to make a dollar in the next day to become the irresponsible greed of people who just want to make a dollar in the next 0.0000000001 seconds.
Re:Awesome... (Score:4, Insightful)
If investment decisions are better made by computer program than by human investors, what justification is left for private ownership of capital? And what's the argument against planned economics?
Can we have another look at the idea of democratically deciding upon our social priorities?
Restatement of an old maxim (Score:2)
Or, in other words, "To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer"
Time for rethink (Score:2)
The real question is: what was the original purpose of the stock market? What problem is it trying to solve? I guarantee that letting people make money by micro-trading of stocks based on nothing but trends and volatility is not it. It's time to rethink the whole system, but wait, there's a trillion dollars and the stability of national economies at stake. We're stuck with it, short of some kind of (permanent) revolution.
Time to go read more Trotsky.
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The real question is: what was the original purpose of the stock market? What problem is it trying to solve?
Price discovery. [wikipedia.org]
The entire point of having a market is to find out what the listed items are worth.
HFTers are not in the market to advance this purpose.
I'll admit that, as a byproduct of their arbitrage, they help.
BUT, allowing HFT to continue trades market volatility for market efficiency.
Considering how lond and hard we've worked to reduce volatility, I suspect it is not a reasonable trade off.
Stock markets are just legalized gambling nowadays (Score:2)
The stock markets are no longer about investing in companies you believe in or who have a solid track record. It's just computerized gambling.
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And gambling is wrong?
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And why should we end something that we don't think is wrong?
Also, why does gambling still exist? Surely something is not right.
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Yeah, for long term investors it's like being the house when the guy sitting at the table playing black jack and knows what the dealers down card is and what the next 10 cards in the shoe are. Usually, the house takes those guys out back and breaks their knees, but it this case, the guy at the table happens to already own the knee-breaking-guys.
Horrible change in Wall Street culture (Score:2)
To previous poster, the stock market is fundamentally designed to put people with cash on hand in touch with entrepreneurs with a need for investment capital. This is NOT what's happening here.
We had a client who bought one of our software libraries about 7-8 years ago and needed our help to build a trading app that employs these silly algorithms. These flash trading algorithms are exploiting market fluctuations that have little to do with fundamentals and sound investments. First you find a statistician
Apparently they are unaware of the 1000 point drop (Score:2)
There was 'no direct evidence' that the computer trading in itself increased volatility, it said, but in specific circumstances it was possible for a series of events with 'undesired interactions and outcomes' to occur and cause massive damage.
Apparently they are unaware of the 1000 point drop in the Dow [reuters.com] last year that appears to have been caused by HFT.
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"Both benefits and severe risk" (Score:5, Funny)
Benefits: More money transferred to the very wealthiest individuals as traders who can't afford HFT servers (physically as close to the trading floor as possible - at these speeds, light is too damn slow) are at a severe disadvantage.
Severe risks: Potential for total economic collapse to take place in the blink of an eye.
I punch those numbers into my calculator and it makes a frownie face.
Re:Not replacing, just adding on top (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not replacing humans, it just improves profit making for those who want to trade
By siphoning value away from those who want to do something productive.
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What is this something productive that the stock market does?
Other than issuing new stock, when is it productive for the companies invested in?
Seems not much different than trading cards, now that most companies don't give dividends.
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The original idea made sense!
Here is how it was supposed to go:
I have a really great idea and here is how I think it will become profitable... I need a metric ass-tonne of money to get going though!
this looks like a solid idea, here is some money to get going in exchange for a small chunk of your company... if it takes off.. this chunk will be worth more than I am giving you now
But I agree, it has become so abstract from this with so much bullshit that just skims off the top that we should j
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Dude, that doesn't explain the original idea.
You do realize that when you buy a share at the NYSE, none of that money goes to the company, right? That's because what we call the stock market is the secondary market. Now, why do we need a secondary market? Because it makes primary investors, who DO give money to the company a little less uneasy about risking their money. If there's someone else they can dump it on, they'll be more willing to put up the money.
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It is a rigged second market. With fees no other secondary market has, it has regulations that prevents market participants from being on even playing ground and on top of it no one is really interested in non-institutional investors.
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The money necessary to trade in the market is minuscule. What regulations are you talking about? The only people who are on a different level are the market makers, because of their rather central position in the system. And that's both meat-and-bones MMs and the HFT kind. And there's nothing stopping you from becoming one either...
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Dude, that doesn't explain the original idea.
You do realize that when you buy a share at the NYSE, none of that money goes to the company, right?
While that is generally true, that is not always the case. First, a company can buy and sell shares it holds; or issue more shares to raise cash.
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Good point. But I'd say companies buying/selling their own shares is still more akin to a primary market operation. Much as when a fund does it.
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What is this something productive that the stock market does?
It allows people like you and me to participate in economic growth.
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That was the idea once upon a time. These days I disagree.
Otherwise stock would have voting rights that mattered and pay dividends.
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First of all, stocks DO have voting rights. The fact that you can't control Coca Cola with your 100 lot is due to other people owning more shares than you. This is no different from your 1 vote for president not mattering at all. Except of course people with more to lose in Coca Cola have more votes, which is entirely appropriate.
Your comment about dividends is telling. Here's the standard explanation that you'll hear in any course about why it doesn't matter: if a company doesn't pay out a dividend, it kee
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First of all, stocks DO have voting rights.
You need to learn the difference between share classes: common vs preferred, voting vs non-voting, etc.
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Yeah, I thought I'd keep it simple and not mention A and B shares, that type of shenanigans. But better keep it simple. You have stock, you can vote. And hey, is it voluntary or not to buy a stock? If the stock you are interested in doesn't have the voting rights you want, well, you decide whether you want to buy it.
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Bullshit. Of course this is different. A democratic vote adheres to "1 man, 1 vote".
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Learn about different share classes.
Your rather flippant reply about dividends is telling. Here is reality, it does not matter because the value of a company no longer has anything to do with the value of what it produces or does.
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if a company doesn't pay out a dividend, it keeps the cash. Investors can then adjust their valuation accordingly.
Which suggests that investors react rationally to the presence or absence of dividend; I think the truth is that all but the most conservative investors simply ignore dividend today, and it's a problem in more ways than I can count.
For one thing, stock ownership is supposed to translate to company ownership; in reality when you buy a stock without a dividend you have no way of making money unless you abandon the company you supposedly own at some future time. What kind of owner doesn't benefit from prof
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It allows people like you and me to participate in economic growth.
Translation: it takes your retirement money and hands it to sociopaths, solely because of preferential tax treatment.
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Issueing new stock would be far more difficult without a functioning market for trading existing stock. So that secondary market is important for the issuing of new stock.
And of course the companies are the objects being traded - the beneficiaries are the owners not the companies.
Re:Not replacing, just adding on top (Score:5, Insightful)
The purpose of the stock market is to provide price discovery. If you had perfect information at all times you would know the price of a good and the stock market would be pointless. But because perfect information is impossible, the stock market crowd-sources the gathering of information so that the true price can be discovered.
Determining the price of a good is something only a human can do. Price is a value quantified, and determining value requires sifting and filtering of information and the application of significant amounts of gut instinct. Computers cannot set prices since they don't have any concept of value -- they have neither needs not wants.
Computer assisted trading -- trades where people set stops and buy limits -- is okay because the human has done the work to determine the valid price ranges a priori; the computer simply executes the bid on behalf of the user.
High Frequency Trading, however, should be illegal since it does not involve human value judgements at all. It simply allows a computer to front-run actual humans and siphon off people attempting to perform a useful act -- that is, price discovery.
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'High Frequency Trading, however, should be illegal since it does not involve human value judgements at all. It simply allows a computer to front-run actual humans and siphon off people attempting to perform a useful act -- that is, price discovery."
The algorithms are just extensions of human judgement. Certain patterns in stock signal that price move is occurring or is about to occur. It is just stop and buy limits, but just very complex ones the depend more on what happened in the past minute than in th
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Agreed.
The way it was supposed to work.. where people would invest in ideas they thought were good in the hopes that they would take off and make a profit... made sense.
It's so abstract from that and there is so much skimming off the top (don't give me "market liquidity" crap...) now that we ideally should just wipe it and start fresh from the basics, with regulations in place to prevent the kind of bullshit that is happening at present.
Problem is the people who could make this kind of thing happen are brin
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don't give me "market liquidity" crap.
It's not all crap. There is value in liquidity. A company that wants to expand needs to be able to finance this expansion. This typically involves either issuing more shares or getting a loan. The former is preferable to the company (no interest to pay), but needs investors. Having some speculators in the market makes it possible for the company to issue the stock and sell it immediately to speculators, who later sell it on to long-term investors once they've had more time to judge the risks.
The pr
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don't give me "market liquidity" crap.
The problem is that we now have a lot more speculators and they dominate the system, so the ability of a company to raise capital no longer depends on whether it's a good long-term investment, but on the opinions of the speculators.
And what do you think the speculators use to determine prices? That's right, they make a judgement as to the long-term prospects of the company. In fact, they freely give out this information for everyone, for free. If you didn't have a market in a company, (suppose it's a privately owned restaurant) you'd have to do a lot of legwork figuring out what it was worth.
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I think they use a number of financial tools and hold a number of positions on a given stock, none of which look at the long term stability, profitability, or sustainability of the company but instead focus on the day to day noise in order to maximize when to trade which option they currently hold the most money in.
These people look for the gaps. The gaps of knowledge, the gaps of valuation, and the gaps of naivety of those just getting into that sort of trading. They at not looking at the value of the empl
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And what do you think the speculators use to determine prices? That's right, they make a judgement as to the long-term prospects of the company. In fact, they freely give out this information for everyone, for free. If you didn't have a market in a company, (suppose it's a privately owned restaurant) you'd have to do a lot of legwork figuring out what it was worth.
No they don't. They determine prices by making a judgement on what others will think the stock will be worth in 5 minutes/5 hours/5 days/5 weeks/5 months time.
It is perfectly normal for a speculator to buy something they think is will be worth $5 in the long term for $15 today because they also think that someone else is going to pay $20 for it tomorrow.
And there's nothing wrong with that, but don't pretend that the long term valuation of something is what they are judging.
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That depends on which speculator you mean, of course.
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don't give me "market liquidity" crap.
It's not all crap.There is value in liquidity.
I don't think he was disputing that- I think you misinterpreted what (I assume) he was trying to say.
Namely that he doesn't believe the stock response that such behaviour is always ultimately beneficial because it increases liquidity- or at least that it doesn't increase liquidity sufficiently to offset the skimming and other drawbacks.
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The large trading houses, who have a direct wire into the exchange, do not pay fees on transactions like the rest of us do.
By doing all of these high volume trades, they more or less get to cut in line and gain benefits of being tied directly into the trading system.
This allows them to reap huge benefits by having a computer do something that you and I would not have access to.
This is literally a mechanism where the trading houses can game the system and skim off the to
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Market makers reduce the bid-ask gap. I get to buy a stock cheaper than I would without them - but they split the difference. I get to sell a stock for more than wothout them - but they split the difference.
The entire business model is splitting the difference, and thereby making it cheaper for the small trader to trade. This is especially visible recently in options trading, where everything is a thin market: bid-ask gaps are far smaller than 10 years ago, thanks to algorithmic trading.
I'm about to sell
Hey Now! (Score:2)
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well, it does it better and cheaper than humans doing the same thing.
Most of the financial industry is just that... people looking at some trends and data and taking actions. It's one of the reasons most actively managed funds don't beat the index year over year. They really don't do anything useful.
They have layers and layers of financial people and associates and advisers... to basically do nothing productive. They basically act as proxies to the actual funds.
So we replace them with a some algorithmic
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In other words, the system will become so complex that we will quite literally be unable to ever quite figure out what's going on, until, of course, it all collapses, kills trillions of dollars in value, renders most economies smoking ruins, and then everyone will finally ask "Why the fuck did ever let that happen?"
Re:Not replacing, just adding on top (Score:4, Insightful)
In other words, the system will become so complex that we will quite literally be unable to ever quite figure out what's going on, until, of course, it all collapses, kills trillions of dollars in value, renders most economies smoking ruins, and then everyone will finally ask "Why the fuck did ever let that happen?"
Umm, I think we've already been there.
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I think we've already been there.
Umm, no. This is something that is still yet to come.
However, the OP was wrong about us asking why we let this happened. Instead, we will declare the brokerages too big to fail, bail them out, make up stories about irresponsible individual, non-computerized traders who "gamed the system" and "caused the crash", and then use the resulting deficits from the bail-out and supporting people through the crash as an excuse to cut benefits to actual people.
Oh... uh, wait... maybe w
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Even without a single computer based trade, the system as so complex that "we will quite literally be unable to ever quite figure out what's going on, until, of course, it all collapses..."
Computers are a new angle, but let's not pretend the market ever made sense before that.
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In other words, the system will become so complex..., kill[ing] trillions of dollars in value, renders most economies smoking ruins, and then everyone will finally ask "Why the fuck did ever let that happen?"
Kind of like what happened in 1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1929, 1973, 1989, 2008...
The take away here is I don't know that adding complexity, as you call it, will cause more crashes than the market's already experienced. Sure, they're painful, but they're inherent in a free market economy, and nothing new. Automating trading isn't going to change anything. I guess you could always outlaw private trading like China did. Oh wait... they kind of do now, don't they?
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+1 insightful
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Doesn't make anything? There's load of container vessels sailing around the oceans delivering "things".
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It's not replacing humans yet. And that's fine. When it does, investors will simply move to a higher level of abstraction and a new level of economic engagement will come into being. Larger, more subtle patterns will become apparent and we will simply have a new game to play.
In the end though it will be turtles all the way down.
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How can you be naked if you're wearing shorts? No wonder it's illegal!
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Nope, then they declare the computer made a mistake and they roll back the trades. If they really fuckup they get the government to bail them out with your tax money.
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And this comes at the same time as The Fed and Chairsatan The Ben Bernank have pretty much destroyed all "safe" investments through manipulation of interest rates, forcing people to turn to
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No matter how good your analysis or how closely you watch the market like a hawk, you're going to be screwed, blued, and tattooed.
I beg to differ. Trading is all about the banks taking out the stops. Once you learn where the soft stops are, you can make money, since you will be trading in the same direction as the big brokers and banks - so long as you stay small enough to not be seen as a target yourself.
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Humans can't beat them easily. Therefore, it's theft of existing property.