Funny, that.
You're putting your own ideas into his mouth. Nobody said anything about the fee being a flat fee, or that it would apply to every single trade in existence.
I'll agree with you there, his proposals were very similar to Trump's in that they did not have much substance, just broad ideas.
What evidence? Specifically, where do you see any evidence?
The article is filled with emotional appeals, doesn't quantify its "calculations", conflates queue size with a lack of liquidity, professes obvious and heavy-handed hero worship for Brad Katsuyama and IEX, and (to top it all off), claims that high frequency trading is front running.
Frankly, I'm shocked it was even published, even as far as op eds go. The article perpetuates the same tired FUD about high frequency trading that IEX continues to push out, and in doing so preempts reasonable discussion about the real negative externalities caused by HFT. The author either doesn't understand, or willfully misconstrues the way in which HFT operates.
It's becoming truly kafkaesque how often this claim comes up on Hacker News.
However the term has expanded a lot over the years to mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So what does it mean to you?
Anyway, I agree with you. I don’t see a significant downside to using a small transaction tax or one of the other suggestions. The real hard question is about the benefit or harm of HFT itself.
I haven’t heard a decisive argument yet, but I would say that the “liquidity defence” of HFT is in unconvincing to me. I don’t see how liquidity can add value past a certain point.
As I said though, I agree with you that there's an onus on those proposing a HFT tax to convict it convincingly. I don't think this has happened yet. The argument can't be "weird and scary." I don't see the liquidity defense. How can liquidity beyond a certain point be meaningfully more useful, but that's not a conviction. In my mind, it rests on how HFT impacts economic fragility, and increases the likelihood or impact of busts.
We're talking about something like a 0.02% of equity tax on HFT specifically or lower if it's going to be everyone. That does not impede the ability to price in real information.
An artificial restriction on trading is not unlike natural ones. Did we have liquidity issues when trading in and out multiple times within tenths of seconds was impossible? I don't think the cost is high. The risk is ..unproven.
Yes. Spreads were a dime (or more). Now they're a penny.
Said proposed tax is nothing more than people who can't compete trying to punish those who can because they don't understand why they're losing.
HFT has improved the market for everyone involved, spreads are lower, liquidity is higher, everyone pays far less for trades than ever before. There's no reason at all to regulate it that isn't simply fear based.
Proposing a tax on trades is punishing those presumed guilty without a lick of actual evidence they are. HFT don't need to prove they're good, they're just traders making trades in the market like anyone else, that they do it faster than a manual trader doesn't make them bad. To try and regulate them should require an actual case be made against them and all such cases I've seen so far are completely irrational emotional arguments by people who just want to point a finger at someone to explain why they're no longer able to compete.
This seems pretty convincing to me. The argument is that, based on the amount that firms are willing to spend on fiberoptic cables to perform hft, they put an extremely high value on hft. On the other hand, reasonable back-of-the-envelope calculations show that the social benefit of making the trade slightly faster are much less than the private cost. This indicates that almost all of the private benefit from hft comes from value accruing to the hft firm at the expense of other hft firms. We therefore expect to see overinvestment in hft.
What about this do you find objectionable?
Here is Vanguard's CEO on the topic:
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-f...
That blog post also makes a mistake of claiming that the advantage of these sorts of fiber optic cables is to let people complete their trades faster. That is not the case. They enable people to execute their trades at better prices. The way he is looking at this issue is almost silly.
Do we really measure the social good of Google by how much capital they put into their fancy server clock syncing (the exact name of the project escapes me)?
How did we get to a point where "reasonable back of the envelope calculations" are what people seriously consider when trying to develop economic policy for the biggest economy in the world?
Why do you want to reduce high frequency trading?
This article has a lot of the reasons. I think loss of confidence in Market Integrity is the most important one.
I'll contest the "confidence in the market" hypothesis, however. As more investors move to index funds, I don't believe "confidence" as defined would have any significant impact by increasing or decreasing, because fewer participants overall will be actively engaged.
I do think if confidence in the market gets low enough it is possible that people will stop investing all together or invest less than they would have. But that is me sidestepping the issue a bit.
High frequency trading only works inasmuch as transaction costs are low, at least that’s my understanding.
If I understand your thesis correctly, you want to decrease liquidity in order to reduce the speed at which high frequency trading can be executed?
I'm not following your point about transaction costs - or do you mean that you'd limit HFT by reducing liquidity, which in turn would reduce their volume, reducing their trade discounts?
The “thesis” is that by putting a small tax on transactions, you will decrease the profitability of trading strategies that involve trading securities many times therefore discouraging them.
Liquidity is a trickier concept. I’m not sure if it has a consistent measurement definition. If you define liquidity as turnover or something close, then lowering trading frequency lowers liquidity by definition. How that affects liquidity in the practical sense for a “regular” investor is an uncertainty. It’s hard for me to imagine that a trader that holds stock for an average of 1 year will have more trouble getting in or out of Google stock, but maybe I’m wrong.
The HFT shops put millions of dollars into research to attempt to ascertain correct prices (e.g. ETF pricing, derivatives pricing, etc). If they are disincentivized from trading in the equities markets, they will no longer be a conduit of relevant pricing information from other global markets into the equities markets. That means investors (big Wall Street firms catered to by IEX) and retail (you and me in our individual accounts) are more likely to be trading mis-priced markets.
You seem to take it at face value that trading at accurate prices is an unalloyed good. But for the extremely overwhelming majority of retail investors — whose only sane strategy is buy and hold — buying at a few tenths of a percentage points closer to the most-accurate possible price is worth nearly nothing (and has negative worth half of the time, practically by definition).
On the other hand, Wall Street has been raking in tens if not hundreds of billions in profits from this service. What value we get from more accurate pricing may very easily be offset by these costs a hundredfold.
I think you are also underestimating the costs to retail investors to not getting accurate pricing. Shaving a few tents of a point off of every trade will have a huge effect on the lifetime earnings of an individuals.
They made 147M in the first quarter of this year. 197M in the first quarter of last year. They might only make 100M/year after costs, but that doesn't represent the 600-900M they take from the market.
HFT is rounding error.
You can't estimate it that way as they don't win or profit on all their trades. At it's height HFT was estimated to responsible 15-25% of daily volume by best guesses (it's some what obfuscated.) I'd be surprised if it was less than 5% today. Not just Virtu of course - all players big and small.
When people talk about making $0.0001 per share that's their ex-ante expectation. It accounts for the fact that you're not going to make money on every trade.
Furthermore, in exchange for "taking" that money from the market, they enhance liquidity, which is directly helpful for price discovery and facilitating trading among both retail and institutional investors.
People are continually moving the goalposts in this thread and others like it. If you're going to talk about Wall Street and fraud, high frequency trading is not the place to start. All of the legitimate arguments against high frequency trading have nothing to do with fraud, they have to do with the dangers of runaway algorithmic trading that coalesces into the same market movements.
But we can't reason about that issue while half the people talking about HFT (almost none of whom actually have experience with trading whatsoever) still think it's front running, or believe it constitutes some sort of fraudulent con over "the little guy."
This is an inaccurate framing of how high frequency trading propagates liquidity in an otherwise illiquid (or strictly less liquid) market. The claim is not that liquidity is contributed on a strictly trade by trade basis, but rather than the low-latency activity has meta-reactive effects owing to enhanced price discovery that increase overall participation by drawing in other traders at different time resolutions. For example, where there may a stagnant order book on one equity (and consequently, few human traders able to fulfill orders without significant pricing penalties), the same order book may draw in competing market makers. They attempt to predict the next price movement - some win and some lose on the immediate sequence of trades, but the consequent activity narrows the bid/ask spread by heightening local participation in the order book and improving the pricing confidence. This has practical ramifications for "human" time resolutions, because the human traders now have a better opportunity to fulfill orders without overpaying. This in turn reduces overcautious traders from participating, and so on and so forth.
For what it's worth, your line of argument has been rehashed for years now on Hacker News, going back to when Chris Stucchio wrote his HFT apologia. Instead of lazily linking to that thread, I'll do one better by walking through research on the subject. Fortunately there is a handy paper that explicitly examines the question, "how does the interaction of these traders in the millisecond environment impact the quality of markets that human investors can observe?"[1] The data is constructed using NASDAQ TotalView with equities in the S&P500 in periods of varying volatility. Both reactive and periodic trading algorithms are reviewed.
Here are a few critical passages:
By tracking submissions, cancellations, and executions that can be associated with each other, we create a measure of low-latency activity. We use a simultaneous equation framework to examine how the intensity of low latency activity affects market quality measures. We find that an increase in low-latency activity lowers short-term volatility, reduces quoted spreads and the total price impact of trades, and increases depth in the limit order book.
IV.B. Results Panel A of Table 4 presents the estimated coefficients of the pooled system side-by-side for the 2007 and 2008 sample periods. First we note that the two instruments have the 25 expected signs and are highly significant. Specifically, the coefficient a2 indicates that when liquidity off NASDAQ is higher, our NASDAQ market quality measures show higher liquidity and lower volatility. Similarly, the coefficient b2 is positive in all specifications, indicating that higher low-latency activity in a specific stock in an interval is associated with higher low-latency activity in other stocks on the NASDAQ system. Second, the estimated b1 coefficients tell us that low-latency activity is attracted to more liquid and less volatile stocks.
The fact that low-latency trading decreases short-term volatility and contributes to depth in the 2008 sample period where the market is relentlessly going down and there is heightened uncertainty in the economic environment is particularly noteworthy. It seems to suggest that PA activity creates a positive externality in the market at the time that the market needs it the most. Panel B of Table 4 presents roughly similar results from the estimation of the system with SpreadNotNasi as the instrument for market liquidity.
It is possible, however, that the impact of low-latency trading on market quality would differ for stocks that are somehow fundamentally dissimilar, like small versus large market capitalization stocks. Table 5 presents system estimates in subsamples consisting of four quartiles ranked by the average market capitalization over the sample period.22 There is not much pattern across the quartiles in the manner low-latency activity affects short-term volatility in the 2007 sample period. The picture in the 2008 sample is different: It appears that during more stressful times, low-latency activity helps reduce volatility in smaller stocks more than it does in larger stocks.
Lastly, Table 6 shows summary statistics for the stock-by-stock estimations. The results suggest similar conclusions concerning the effect of low-latency trading on market quality. In particular, an increase in low-latency activity decreases short-term volatility, decreases quoted spreads, and increases displayed depth in the limit order book. This is true both in the 2007 and 2008 sample periods.
_______________
1. http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhasbrou/Research/Working%20Pape...
A few tenths of a percent is on the order of less than $100/year assuming that a retail investor invests the maximum amount allowed inside a 401k each year (ignoring for a second that typical 401k plans do not permit investing directly in individual stocks and also ignoring catch up contributions for older folks). It's just not a significant amount of money at the level of an individual retail investor.
The average retail investor should not be making enough trades for this to matter.
Bringing down the price of trades like this only makes it cheaper for the suckers — day traders — to think they're playing the game. It is of marginal utility for the average retail investor.
Yes, there's some nice compounding in between, assuming that you buy and hold with no further trades. But, there's a wide gulf between "day trading" and active stock-picking. Assuming that your average hold time is 5 years per stock, you're still going to rack up a lot of commission costs at $35 per trade.
Am I missing something here?
Yes. By paying relatively small amounts to high frequency market makers in return for enhanced liquidity and price discovery, you won't be overpaying by 1% (or more). I also challenge the idea that it would just "balance" itself out, in the absence of evidence supporting that thesis. In actuality you'd likely just amplify the costs you already have and either fill fewer trades or have higher costs for doing so.
Choosing to lose $1 due to low liquidity instead of a few cents due to market makers is both petty and nonsensical. There are legitimate arguments against HFT, but they don't begin by trying to reinvent economics such as to de-emphasize optimal price discovery.
That's not really that much in the scheme of things, but it's only one company, and I doubt the other investors would be willing to spend similar on insurance against volatility.
It really isn't though. It's been maligned as part of a smear campaign by the actual rent-seekers, Wall Street proper, as other commenters have noted.
What? No it wouldn't. You are disproportionately rewarding makers in this scenario. You would find plenty of listed orders, which somewhat looks like liquidity, but it would not be a liquid market. The end result would be a market that is actually less liquid because no one wants to fulfill orders. It would be utterly lopsided.
How many times do you trade a year? Actually perform trades? Even including mutual funds, I think it's < 100 yr.
> Remember how he was widely pronounced deranged for suggesting that there should be a fee associated with trades? How it would destroy the market?
Who said this, specifically? What is your point in bringing it up?
> Remember when Sanders proposed a small fee on every trade on Wall Street to discourage high frequency trading and to recoup some value from the market?
I'm getting the sense that you'd be in favor of this - can you tell me why, in your own words, you believe we should be trying to "recoup value" from the activities of high frequency traders?
I have no idea if Sanders' plan was good or not, I'm more grousing about how critically important principles of how the market is supposed to work seem to vary depending on whether you're talking about consumer-level investments vs. institutional investors.
Who is "skimming a tiny bit of cash off of every trade"? Do you buy into the notion that HFT is somehow so fast that it can travel back in time and jump ahead of orders that have just executed?
Either fees on every trade distort the market, and in that case the exchange is distorting the market, or they don't have appreciable effects and the government can levy that tax.
My opinion is that this a political opinion, and pretending that this is an economic concern is just a smokescreen.
The government already takes (more than) its fair share, from existing taxes. It has no right to also levy a tax on every trade on every exchange.
> Who said this, specifically? What is your point in bringing it up?
Sanders. The point in bringing it up is to point out the irony that Wall Street already does this behind the scenes, but people called the Senator crazy for proposing it.
> I'm getting the sense that you'd be in favor of this - can you tell me why, in your own words, you believe we should be trying to "recoup value" from the activities of high frequency traders?
Shortest terms I can put this is: our country needs the money that Wall Street siphons off of the economy. We need more government money to educate, house, feed, and care for people. High frequency trading, unlike traditional investment, is not a "mom and pop" thing, it's a tool only accessible to the wealthy to enrich themselves. Thus, we should disincentivize it in order to generate tax revenue and discourage practices that are not accessible to shareholders.
> but people called the Senator crazy for proposing it.
Who called him crazy? That is my question. And the corollary to that question - why do we care about this party, and why is it relevant to the point? A lot of people say plenty of idiotic things, but that doesn't mean they have any real authority in the matter.
I'm looking for precision and an understanding of why it's relevant.
> Shortest terms I can put this is: our country needs the money that Wall Street siphons off of the economy.
This is an emotionally loaded claim, and it's also not axiomatic. How precisely does Wall Street "siphon off of the economy" without providing value in exchange?
> High frequency trading, unlike traditional investment, is not a "mom and pop" thing, it's a tool only accessible to the wealthy to enrich themselves.
High frequency trading is a very small industry compared to all the types of trading that occurs on Wall Street. It has outsize publicity for a variety of reasons, many of which circle back to FUD.
Moreover, every single type of trading firm is only accessible to the wealthy - that is very nearly what defines institutional trading. You are no more going to start a discretionary hedge fund than you are going to set up colocation and an FPGA for high frequency trading, which means that HFT is not nearly alone in being inaccessible.
You're not actually explaining your point here. You're just repeating claims without defending them. On the contrary, market makers (who almost exclusively use HFT these days), provide liquidity to the market, just as the institutional investors in charge of endowments and pension funds provide value for retail investors' retirement savings.
If I understand you correctly, there are a couple issues you're bringing up:
1. Wall Street "siphons" off money from the economy.
2. The US government needs higher revenues.
3. HFT, as distinguished from "traditional investment," only benefits the rich.
4. 1-3 are problems whose best solution is to tax HFT specifically.
As for "siphoning" - do you mean to imply that making money by buying and selling a financial asset is somehow cheating someone, unfair, or something else? Or do you think that by sometimes functioning as "middle-men," HFT and Wall Street's are somehow cheating someone, unfair, or some other bad thing?
What is "traditional investment?"
What do you think of the fact that Wall Street and HFT firms combine to pay many billions of dollars in income taxes?
[1] https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD000...
At best, there could be a meaningful debate over increasing the appropriation to the SEC and adding new regulation mandates for them.
The question over whether we should have transaction fees should already be settled by the fact that the SEC is currently funded by such fees.
There would probably have to be a law to prevent people from running markets at faster time-scales on top of this.
1) Let's say that trades are resolved at time X. Participants have every incentive to submit all bids/asks as close to time X as possible (microseconds possibly).
2) How do you handle a mismatched number of bids/asks at a given price? Resolving this difficulty without creating bigger problems than the problem you were trying to eliminate is challenging.
3) I'm just a regular guy who wants to buy $1000 of stock as part of my monthly savings plan. With an up to date market I can just buy and sell at the market price and not worry about it. But now I have to be afraid that there has been some big news event in the past hour that will make this hours price much different than last hours. One of the biggest services markets provide is up to date pricing information. Why do you want to take that away from me?
2) The system itself resolves it. Either it prevents you from making a buy/bid for something that was already "fulfilled" (though this would leak information). Or it accepts them sequentially, and refunds you at the end of the hour.
3) We're not taking that away from you. We'd be taking it away from everyone. You are welcome to see last hour's trades and try trade on it.
Additional points:
2) Another option. If your order didn't make it, the system can simply let it "stay" on on the system to be fulfilled in the future. If someone wants to take you up on the offer you made, they'll do it in the next hour, or any subsequent hour.
2A) Preventing unmatched bids/asks will not work. Remember that you are starting at zero. All bids/asks are unmatched when you start with an empty order book. If you relax this some then yes you will leak and you are back to where you started.
2B) If you handle things sequentially then you have reintroduced a speed imperative. I, again, have an incentive to go fast to get first in line.
3) Yes, of course you are taking it away from everyone, but that matters more to me (an unsophisticated guy with no real time market research) than it does to BIG_HEDGE_FUND_GUY who does have such things and can, more easily, figure out what the market price should be without the help of the market. You are putting me at a disadvantage and him at an advantage. Is that really your goal?
The amount of disinformation surrounding HFT is staggering.
Stuff like antibiotics, electric lights, refrigeration, washing machines, phones, computers all have all led to direct and immediate quality of life improvements. Often on the order of a tenfold improvement for that activity, and they are easily within reach of the majority of the population.
What would become 10x worse for the average person if HFT were to vanish overnight? Would mortgage rates massively spike? Would bond rates plummet? Is there some quantifiable financial thing that would regress to whatever terrible situation we were in back in 1990 before HFT was substantial?
Since 1990, US population has increased 30% while the (inflation corrected) GDP has increased 90%. So something improved. I'm going to (arbitrarily) say it was computer literacy, since home PC ownership went from 15% of households to 85% of households in that time period.
What can you counter with to say that the improvements were from market efficiency? If we never had HFT, how much lower would the GDP be?
It sounds like you saying that private companies that don't participate in the stock market are incapable of managing capital or achieving growth.
401k is a great indicator, but I'm not sure it makes HFT look very good. The median trade time is more than 1000x faster than in 1990. But people's 401ks are not doing 1000x better. Did we hit a point of diminishing returns long ago? If so, is HFT pointless?
I feel like you are conflating HFT with electronic trading. Electronic trading can be HFT or slow, either way it is cheap and cuts the middleman out.
You seem to have this backwards notion that they need to justify their existence, they don't, they're just traders executing their rights to buy and sell like everyone else. It's those like you seeking to regulate HFT that need to justify yourselves. You don't even understand what HFT is really as you're asking basic questions like what does market efficiency mean and does HFT help it, and you think you're in a position to question someone else's trading habits? Really? HFT doesn't need to look good, those of you trying to punish them need to show some actual evidence they're doing something bad, but they're not and you can't.
Efficiency in a market means things are priced accurately and you're not getting ripped off when you buy or sell; if you find that vague and hand wavy, well, sorry but that's what it means and you should be able to understand that without further explanation. HFT traders make the price more accurate benefiting you and everyone else, they don't need to justify themselves, you need to justify your witch hunt against them.
HFT is a form of electronic trading, I'm not conflating them, they're just different forms of using tech to trade and there's valid reason at all to single either of them out as bad. HFT are market makers, they're providing you and everyone else liquidity for a vastly smaller fee than you've been provided it ever before. So say thank you to HFT, enjoy your cheaper trades and increased liquidity, and go find a real problem to complain about instead of attacking those who make your life better.
Yes, trades would cost a lot more. Every time your money was put into a stock, some middle men would take more of it than they do now. Trades would take longer, you might not get the price you thought you were getting when said buy or sell because the price might change in the time it took some dude to go manually buy or sell the shares you requested. That directly affects everyone with a 401k or stock. HFT has eliminated a large swath of useless middle men who were gouging you for money: those middle men are pissed they've been obsoleted and lost access to easily profit and are the now pushing to regular HFT, so they can go back to the good old days of bigger profits and more room for middle men taking a bigger bit of the average mans investment money.
HFT saves every market participant money, except the old school traders whom they've largely obsoleted.
Speed doesn't make money by itself anymore, so a lot of players whose only trick was being fast and not-so-smart are having problems.
We sponsored the x64 port of LuaJIT and kicked off a sponsorship system for it [1]. OpenResty took nginx and integrated it with LuaJIT. Ten years later, CloudFlare started using OpenResty and LuaJIT to protect massive swathes of the Internet. This kind of butterfly effect makes me smile.
The same HFT crew discovered critical issues in the circa-2009 Linux kernel, wherein there was significant packet loss on multicast workloads [2]. We were using bleeding edge Debian/Ubuntu distros whereas much of the industry used more stable kernels (which didn't have the issue). So because of our hard work, along with much love from the incredible Eric Dumazet, we figured it out and everybody benefitted (especially RedHat and SUSE who got to put the fixed kernel in their stable releases a couple years later).
We also sponsored other open source projects, Debian packaging, etc. HFT firms from 2006-2010 were early adopters of the advanced network and computing technologies that now power the clouds (e.g. Arista, Solarflare, various acquired storage/network companies); those companies might not be around now if they didn't get those early wins from the finance community.
[1] https://luajit.org/sponsors.html [2] http://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg90771.html
The guys who were fined for manipulating the NASDAQ closing auction?
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-10-16/high-spee...
Of course it was shot down, that's one way to tell that he was cutting close to the bone.
This is most certainly factual.
and most soulless people in the world.
This is a factually unsupportable adhominem. Sentiment that contributes to outrage on social media is a form of cultural pollution. People use it for short term gain, but it's a kind of externality which is tearing society apart. (FWIW, I dislike this situation as well.)
(Yes, this is obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc )
CO2 is the best analogy. There needs to be a certain amount for the utility. Too much and too little are detrimental.
Viewing it as just 'pollution' implies that it has no value.
This is an all-or-nothing fallacy. It's the amount produced which is the issue in the analogy. In reality, there are also finer grained quality issues.
To further demonstrate the application of your fallacy, I would agree that there are problems with under-prosecution of certain crimes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHMGbtGGdbQ
However, when the outrage which has reached a fever pitch such that people start calling for abrogation of Innocent Until Proven Guilty based on inherent characteristics, something has gone wrong. Our culture has known, since the times in which the Magna Carta was written, that the protection of the individual from arbitrary imprisonment and prosecution is essential to prevent totalitarian abuses of power.
Outrage is easy to over use, its over-use is readily rewarded and such over-use is clearly everywhere, even despite the fact that it's only the excesses of the "other side" that are easily discerned.
Not really. Pollution is uniformly unwanted by definition (without you changing the goalposts to CO2, which is naturally occurring, and the naturally occurring CO2 would not be considered as pollution, whereas human created CO2 would). In fact, let's stick with the wikipedia definition:
"Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change."
Outrage, on the other hand, may be very much wanted, or even required. I'm not defending ALL outrage. I'm defending that some outrage may occasionally be warranted. You saw an all or nothing fallacy where there was none. To recap -
Argument: Outrage is cultural pollution.
My Response: All pollution is unwanted, some outrage may be occasionally wanted or warranted.
Your response: Saying pollution has no value is an all-or-nothing fallacy!
The worst kind of bad reasoning is the false accusation of a fallacy. Because the person making that claim should know better.
"Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into the natural environment that cause adverse change."
This is either an honest mistake or a pedagogical trick you're pulling. In the general point, I mean pollution in the sense people mean when they say something like "noise pollution." "Pollution" in my analogy (which isn't the same referent as above) would be excess CO2 -- in large enough quantities this is a bad thing, and everyone should know that fact. The validity of the underlying point really has nothing to do with your nitpick. Just substitute "bad thing" for that word in your head. Your whole argument vanishes, and my point remains.
Your response: ... is an all-or-nothing fallacy!...The worst kind of bad reasoning is the false accusation of a fallacy.
You do have an all or nothing fallacy, and your falsely claimed refutation is actually an irrelevant language nitpick. However, I don't find that a quarter as disturbing as the seeming attachment you have to outrage as some kind of tool for convincing others. That's not convincing. That's coercing.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/03/02/the-limits-of-epistemi...
On the 21st century internet, an alarmingly large portion of it is. Some outrage is justified, clearly. However, the incentive structures online are so extremely skewed in favor of producing outrage, we need a new form of skepticism. I was once outraged by the notion, "Pics, or it didn't happen!" But on reflection, I realized that the new incentive structures made the rewarding of internet fakery far too likely. Young people, realizing this, reacted in a rational way!
As with "pics or it didn't happen" this is going to be hard for many to hear, but there needs to be a more rational approach online. As it is, the lowered bar for producing online commentary and media has meant a general drop in quality, and this extends to commentary and media produced for activism and activism itself.