Algorithmic traders just happen to be the ones taken advantage of here because they move fastest. If there were no algorithmic traders and everything was done manually the distortion in the market would still exist. An imperfect analogy: imagine you go out to the gas station to buy gas and see that there is a line of cars at the gas station charging $2.00/gal but there is no line of cars at the gas station charging $2.01/gal. You go to the $2.01/gal gas station, because you see that there's huge demand and you need gas now. As you drive back, you pass all of the $2.00/gal cars and realize they are all empty. You've been cheated by spoofing.
Whether this is paternalistic or not is up for debate.
Does this logic apply to non-financial field? If someone (person X) creates a fake demand for a SaaS service Y and company Z builds service Y, should X pay money because Z decided to build Y, without a written contract between X and Z?
Putting out a press release, or RFP, saying 'we want to buy X quantity of Y' without the intent to follow up isn't illegal. However, getting to the point of a handshake agreement with a specific vendor but then backing out means that you will be expected to pay compensation even though no formal contract was signed.
Absolutely but simply stating interest or saying "We want to buy X quantity of Y", without having any agreement with a company or stating company name isn't agreeing to purchase nor should be seen (except certain situations) as bad
If yoy want to buy the cards to play, are you affected by the unregulated spoofing, market manipulation? Are you allowed to print your own?
There is a thriving second hand market (both paper and digital) with prices going from a few cents (or less) for bulk commons to ten of thousands for first edition power 9. The cheapest (but still very expensive) way to play the game is to buy the cards you need on the market instead of opening up packs and hoping to find what you need.
Speculators are known to buy up less liquid (printing of) cards to simulate demand, then unload them when the price is up. Not all (or even most) price spikes are due to speculators of course.
Also there are often spikes of certain older cards before new sets are released which happen to contain new cards that work well these old cards, suggesting that insiders of Wizard of the Coast or retailers are leaking and/or trading on non public information.
You can't print your own cards to participate in sanctioned tournaments, but of course, when playing with friends you can do whatever your playgroup allows.
> Also there are often spikes of certain older cards before new sets are released which happen to contain new cards that work well these old cards, suggesting that insiders of Wizard of the Coast or retailers are leaking and/or trading on non public information.
This obviously sucks
> You can't print your own cards to participate in sanctioned tournaments, but of course, when playing with friends you can do whatever your playgroup allows.
If you are a casual player, planning to play with friends only, are you actually hurt in any way by the speculators?
At the end of the day Magic is also about collecting, and even if your playgroup allows playing with proxies, I would say that most players do at least desire to actually own the cards they play with; in fact many players are willing to even pay (often significant) extras for specific editions (foils for example) of cards for their pet deck.
I lost you here probably due to my unfamiliarity with some financial instruments. I am only aware of two types of an order: market and limit. The first one is unaffected for obvious reason.
In case of a limit order, let's say you are trying to sell. You think fair price is X, while currently market only offers (X-a). So you put limit sell order at X. What do you mean in this situation by "market moves against me"? The price goes further down? If that is the correct interpretation, when putting your order you actually have to reduce the limit price in order to increase the chances of your order to succeed, thereby increasing liquidity.
You grow wheat. You want to make sure that you can get $X for your wheat in 6 months and you are willing to risk the upside of a wheat shortage for protection against the downside of a wheat glut. Your counterparty makes bread. They're willing to lock in a price of $X now for wheat delivered in 6 months at the inverse cost of your reasoning. You've both hedged. The world is better because I can buy bread made from wheat in 6 months at a reasonable price. Traders and Wall Street came along and perverted this, but it is still a primary purpose of the market at its bedrock. If the bakers and the farmers disappear, there is no wheat market for the traders to pervert. It is the foundational hedger that the prohibition protects.
Compare: you trade crypto. You want to sell your crypto for dollars. Later, you want to buy your crypto for dollars. When the hell does anyone else care about your crypto? Why would we care about the integrity of price discovery in the crypto market when it has (or should have) no impact on the real world outside of your economic gains/losses? If we don't care about price discovery and its integrity, we have no need for the prohibition.
After 2008, the big algo traders got involved and spoofing was a huge issue because algos are often based on market depth. And the law was changed overnight (and the heavy-handed way that the federal govt came down on individuals, often at the request of algo traders, is unusual).
Just generally: "spoofing" was always seen as unethical but it rarely mattered before 2008 because humans learned fairly quickly that when someone piled in orders around the price, it wasn't necessarily real. Equally, what we have also seen is that certain order types that were being used to conceal intention from algos (concealing your intention is a fundamental part of how markets operate) were also being lumped in with "spoofing".
On JPM specifically, everyone knew they were spoofing for decades before this. I am not aware of an IB that did spoofing like JPM, and the reason why is that they did a ton of volume in these markets and used spoofing to control the price.