https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/02/knight-capital-says-...
Knight had a terrible software delivery process and a lot of deadline-oriented pressure on techies.
Makes total sense. It's almost as if everyone at a company should be on the same team :)
Should capital markets work? Should people be allowed to dynamically allocate capital to the most attractive companies?
The argument tends to be that making a decision about buying and selling in microseconds is not providing value, but generally everyone agrees that it should be possible at some level (by minute? by hour? by day?). There are a bunch of arguments here but broadly speaking I don't see how they change the underlying game. Make good decisions on where to allocate capital, make money as the market price caches up with your prediction.
In particular, since one of the objects is to grind long enough that the rules of the game don't apply to you, see 'Goldman Sachs', I think the original poster's criticism is valid.
There is no referee. The only goal is to give game winners more money, and if they screw up, give them their money back and then give them more money. It justifies things like investments in index funds (or identifying those who are already competing outside the rules and rewarding them by investing more money in them since they cannot fail), but it's gone well beyond the rational functioning of a system, much less a self-regulating system with useful purposes.
It's Calvinball. Go ahead and enjoy it, but it's not right.
how did it interface to the poker-playing site? was there an api, or were you masquerading as the client?