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Comment by dmichulke | Hacker News Reader

Zerohedge is one of the most remarkable web sites today. I started reading it after 2009 and today it's (along with HN) my daily read.

For me as a Westerner there are few places where I can read non-mainstream opinions on things like the war in Syria, the oil price and currency wars, the daily SNAFU in the financial worldlike Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP).

To be sure, the headlines are often sensationalist but the content often exceeds whatever analysis you can get to read from mainstream media (= the big online newspapers in the US, and Europe).

Here is Zerohedge's response to the above article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...

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That is astonishing. If you remove the usual conspiracy theories and the right wing populism crap there is not much more left than you can read on bloomberg or any other financial news site.

That's completely untrue. Zero Hedge breaks news before a lot of outlets and writes on a lot of market events that other sources will not touch. I'm not disagreeing that you need to have a filter when reading but they absolutely do provide value.

> breaks news before a lot of outlets

Any examples?

All their coverage of hft when nobody was talking about it

The usual coverage of HFT on ZH is like this:

Gold price spikes down, it's the HFT slamming it because they work for the Central Banks. Gold price spikes up, it's because investors are concerned about the market.

Stocks spike up, it's the HFT again. Stocks spike down - investors start seeing that the whole market is a scam.

So the HFT trade only in the "wrong" direction according to ZH. They sell gold and buy stocks. Never the other way around. I'm exaggerating, but only a bit, there were a few articles which blamed HFT for "right" moves (gold up, stocks down).

I meant around the time of the flash crash and in them making hft more mainstream

Everyone I've talked to that works in HFT --- and that's a bunch, because we built a trading CTF --- sums Zero Hedge up the same way 'yummyfajitas (also a former HFT) does: "a conspiracy theory site without the theories".

"conspiracy theories"

From their response article: "We are ok with being typecast as "conspiracy theorists" as these "theories" tend to become "conspiracy fact" months to years later. "

They do end up with actual charts and graphs so there is some data to be had there.

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