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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Do they actually produce something valuable for society, or is it just the trading profit they are after?

How about being able to go buy stocks/ETFs paying nothing in commissions and razor thin spreads today? A few decades ago you'd pay O($10-100) per trade and then some in bid/ask

This is all largely thanks to HFT. Robinhood is only viable because big HFT firms are willing to pay dearly for the privilege to serve retail order flow

People who work there will tell you that they provide liquidity, which is a valuable thing to have in markets. I've always been a bit skeptical of how much value they provide there though given that they don't hold on to anything for very long but I'm not particularly informed about it.

Mostly it seems like they scrape pennies off out of the market to enrich the people who work there (they have no outside investors afaik), so imo they are pretty neutral. Not a bad place to be, lots of companies are negative.

> given that they don't hold on to anything for very long

Why would they need to?

facebook doesn't produce any value for society either

Facebook's tendency to display content which reflect more extreme versions of the opinions that the user already has is probably a sizeable force behind our societies growing division. They know this, but they also know that type of content stops people from clicking off their site and drives up engagement, giving them more opportunities to advertise to you. They are a net negative to society.

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