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Comment by mmodahl | Hacker News Reader

The technology put a lot of people out of work and at the same time eliminated a loophole that wealthy people had to take advantage of the markets.

That is a recipe for vilification.

Think of the wrath of the unemployed truck and taxi drivers that will be aimed at the evil computer programmers and engineers who perfect self-driving cars and trucks. The headlines will be amazing.

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The technology targets the wealthy people who were taking advantage of the markets.

This is true only to a certain extent. Mutual funds have been getting squeezed and the impact, though not immense, trickles down to millions of middle class investors.

No. The opposite is true. Vanguard, one of the largest and beyond a doubt the most trustworthy mutual fund complex, is on the record repeatedly as saying HFTs have lowered their cost of trading.

Where did you get your claim from? I can source mine, if you really need me to.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2330053&d...

Then source it...

http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...

Vanguard runs etfs mostly, so I'm not sure why they care about support small spreads since they probably do a lot of efp trades (I'm not sure how the underlying prices are determined, but I think they can convert at a set price). The mutual funds and hedge funds who are more fundamental will try and buy or sell large blocks, so they're more affected by adverse market moves from trying to dump $1M of apple. I could see VG's attitude change a little since there are more traders engaged in rebalancing arb. If you know that the S&P index has to allocate more money to a certain stock, you can buy it ahead of time and sell to VG for a slightly higher price. If you're a passive fund with $1B in an etf, everyone knows what you're obligated to do. It's basically stat arb with higher probability. I still buy VG funds though

> Vanguard runs etfs mostly

Is there a socially acceptable way to call a person an ignoramus on HN?

Sorry, what's ignorant about that?

Vanguard has something like three trillion dollars under management, only 450Bn of which are ETFs. Vanguard is not the largest ETF provider, but has long been the #1 mutual fund provider. Anyone who rebuts an argument about Vanguard's role in the mutual fund industry by saying "Vanguard mostly runs ETFs" doesn't know what Vanguard is.

No.

"Vanguard runs ETFs mostly"?

No, the exact opposite happened, narrowing the spread is super favorable to mutual funds http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...

I only invest in index funds. I do not day trade. I am all for HFT and a liquid market.

I think it put several hundred people out of work at nyse and nasdaq who were also charged with colluding for $.50 tick size. They went quietly. The repercussions have come from institutional investors and banks who we're used to putting in 100,000 lot orders without the market moving against them. I do see some wrath coming from drivers too. The companies they're pissed at are too well known though. People will still see google and tesla as inovators and get behind them

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