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Comment by Torkel | Hacker News Reader

Same stock is listed in more than one place, and also e.g. stock movements in NY affect stocks in London. There are undersea cables built for this purpose: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...

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What a waste of human ingenuity. And I thought ad-tech was bad enough

That is true for much of the finance field.

Actually it's not. There are objective benefits to society that you simply ignore.

As there are objective downsides that we, collectively, are ignoring right now.

Financial capitalism shouldn't be praised, at the very best it's a lesson, we got useful tools out of it and that is all.

I am not praising anything, I am correcting your statement that much of the financial industry is a waste of human ingenuity. That "waste of human ingenuity" enabled us to build the modern world.

It wasn't my statement.

I think you can argue on the whole is a waste, but I do believe it does have some advantages. EG efficient HFTs can reduce bid ask spreads which does save a lot of money for retail traders.

I think the premise was that such investments are wasteful if it's only for a trading arms race.

But being able to do that 50 milliseconds faster really doesn't.

> EG efficient HFTs can reduce bid ask spreads which does save a lot of money for retail traders.

Berkshire Hathway has $1000+ spreads yet you dont see a lot of people complaining.

Stock price is probably a pretty big factor in that along with volume.

Exactly, that is the point.

Don't forget using the equivalent of the entire power consumption of Austria to mine bitcoin?

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