Which would you say is more morally problematic, HFT or figuring out ways of making people click ads?
The company was run by car salesperson types.
And their clients were even more sleazy. One of the popular joke they repeated with clients was that everyone is unhappy, and if they are not, then they haven't seen the right ad.
It was pretty amazing to see "startup" founders come in and say they want to make the world a better place. Then say they need to target stupid people because they spend the most money. Or only an idiot would buy their crap but there are a lot of idiots.
A lot of subscription services are started by rich stay at home spouses. Many of them didn't even really care about about making money but just wanted it as a status symbol and a way to get their pictures appear in their friend's feed. It was funny how wanted to make sure their friends saw their ad, even though they knew their friends will never buy whatever.
After working there for a year, I decided I will never deal with anything remotely related to adtech. Professionally, I am not yet fully removed from adtech. Stuff I work on now is indirectly used by adtech companies.
But I used to spend a lot of time making websites monetized with AdWords. Now I do algotrading as a hobby and feel a lot better about it. There are no false pretenses. It is just about making money. Honest, pure, simple. And it is challenging.
So I would say ads are definitely a lot worse.
They're also (belatedly and sometimes decreasingly) heavily regulated in most of the world. What they do isn't always rent-seeking.
Mob bosses own legitimate businesses. They're still crooks.
edit: Just FYI: I am not anti-bank. I am anti "capture 1/3 of all economic profits". No economy can survive that sort of parasitic activity in the long term, regardless of the intention behind it.
They charge you for not having enough money in your checking account, while using your money to give out loans and make money off of that. Basically charging you for being poor while making money off of your by fee and loaning your money to other people.
I'm old enough to remember they never charge a fee for not having enough money in the bank account. I left my bank for a credit union.
Also Well Fargo was caught recently in a dubious sketchy scheme.
It's a very complex systematic problem. I'm not saying burn all banks let's move to the jungle and eat coconuts.
If you're willing to "steal" from other companies, why wouldn't you also "steal" from the owners of your own company? Why pay a dividend when you can pay bonuses?
How could "making people click ads" be worse?
I don't think anyone on hacker news would bat an eye if your comment said "Ads are problematic" before this sentence.
It's also unclear to how HFTs are eavesdropping on anyone, they use publicly available (for a price) data.
Imagine two investors sitting at a restaurant table discussing trades they are about to make. The trades they are making will be significant, in the sense that their trades will then impact the value of the stocks they're trading. Meanwhile, a waiter at the restaurant makes a habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of these investors. When he gets the information, he runs to the phone and effects his own, smaller trade.
It's not that the waiter happened to overhear something. The waiter makes it his business to "overhear." The waiter adds no real value. He's a parasite on the people who do add value. The HFT traders are likewise.
What they do is documented in Michael Lewis's Flashboys.
https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Wall-Street-Revolt/dp/0393...
Your metaphor is inaccurate. Your metaphor describes actual front running, which is indeed illegal. It does not describe the sort of latency arbitrage that HFTs do, which Michael Lewis has unfortunately also dubbed "front running" (and succeeded at changing the lay population's definition of the term).
I would try to adjust your metaphor to be correct but it isn't really possible. There is no eavesdropping. HFTs do not know anything about trades before they happen. If they see a large trade, they adjust their prices after the trade happens (possibly on another exchange). This isn't eavesdropping, they are operating on public information, just very quickly. It's the foundation of all market making: adjusting prices according to order flow.
A buy is tendered from Timbuktu. The offer will need to travel from Timbuktu to the NYSE. The Flash Boys find out about this buy offer before the sellers using the NYSE system do, so they insert themselves.
The buyer in Timbuktu sees a price of 100 dollars. As are all prices, this 100 dollar quote is "historical." The price will be what it is when the trade is actually effected. The buyer offers 101 dollars. The Flash Boys get ahead of the game, buy the stock at 100.50 and resell it for 101.
That's boiling it down to the essentials. I could be wrong about what the book says. The book could be wrong in its characterization of what goes on. Please, you tell me.
The key part that you're missing is that latency arbitrage works only when there are multiple exchanges, and there is only one exchange in your example. Your example suggests that HFTs somehow see the buy order before it reaches the NYSE, but that is not possible. In reality it would be something like this:
- Buyer wants to buy 100,000 shares at $100, but no single stock exchange (there are 13 in the US I believe, soon to be 14) has that many shares available at that price. - But there are 50,000 shares each available at NYSE and NASDAQ each, so they send orders to each. - Their NYSE order arrives first, and the trade happens at $100 for all 50,000 shares - The HFT notices, and seeing that demand is high for the stock, increases their price on NASDAQ to $100.01 for those remaining 50,000 shares. - The buyer's order on NASDAQ does not trade, because the $100 is no longer available
The "information leakage" is from public information only - that a trade happened on another exchange.
Note also that no part of this example discusses the HFT buying a certain price, then selling back immediately at a higher price.
- Buyer wants to buy 100,000 shares at $100, but no single stock exchange (there are 13 in the US I believe, soon to be 14) has that many shares available at that price.
- But there are 50,000 shares each available at NYSE and NASDAQ each, so they send orders to each.
- Their NYSE order arrives first, and the trade happens at $100 for all 50,000 shares
- The HFT notices, and seeing that demand is high for the stock, increases their price on NASDAQ to $100.01 for those remaining 50,000 shares.
- The buyer's order on NASDAQ does not trade, because the $100 is no longer available