There is no reason why shares should be bought on sold in time frames far too short for anything to have meaningfully changed about the companies or market conditions.
In addition you have redundancy in the markets system. Exchanges are important for national security... Having everything centralized would risk people's retirements, savings, and more
HFT is an easy thing to attack, but I've never encountered a lucid argument for why it's bad. "It's not fair that I'm not as fast" isn't really a reason unless you explain why removing liquidity (i.e., making it harder for you to find a buyer at your price point), paired with you moving up the "trading swiftness" rankings, is preferable.
Why not go all the way and have markets running 24/7/365?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-07/nasdaq-jo... (https://archive.ph/JySaV)
Maybe you expect to be one of them, but you'll probably just end up in the soup lines with everyone else.
yes, let's keep creating too-big-to-fails instead and reward them with bailouts for their mismanagement and borderline criminal misconduct.
Or maybe we live in a world where nuance exists and there are there are more options on the table than anarchy and oligarchy?
it's unfair in the same vein that the rich are always offered better loan rates than the poor. Yeah, it's obvious why that would be, but it's not fair either.
although imo pushing small-backer arbitrage out of the equation is a good thing.
The only kind of trading that really good HFT trading pushes out is other slower less efficient arbitrage traders, but why should we want more worse arbitrage traders if the result is markets being more out of sync?
What's important economically is that traders that trade based on fundamentals can do so efficiently across multiple markets. Efficient HFT arbitrage trading helps that, it doesn't hinder it.
But a cursory examination of history would reveal that the literal opposite has happened.
Also what's the difference between a system, a dynamic system and a 'dynamical' system?
Rule 611 compresses that signal. By forcing everything to orbit a size-agnostic NBBO, it collapses a lot of the “behavioral bandwidth” (depth, imbalance, sweep patterns, replenishment, cancel/replace cadence) into a single top-of-book tick. Less resolution, less information.
High-resolution flow tells you who wants what, at what size, and how urgently. When we gate execution through protected quotes, we encourage tactics that flick the top-of-book with tiny size and discourage truthful size revelation. That’s signal destruction dressed up as protection.
Letting informed counterparties print away from the protected price (to reflect size or information) increases informational content. You get cleaner read-through from actual willingness to trade, instead of a compliance-driven dance around a fragile benchmark.
So yes: other people’s actions are the best data feed. The more of that behavior we can see—in size, time, and venue—the better our discovery gets. 611 reduces that visibility by design.
The better the computers hooked directly into the exchange get you mean.
> The better the computers hooked directly into the exchange get you mean.
I think you're trolling with this one. But you had an advantage typing your comment into a web browser compared to all the people who wrote theirs on paper and put it in an envelope with a stamp.
This is a claim, it is not being backed up by evidence.
I think you're trolling with this one. But you had an advantage typing your comment into a web browser compared to all the people who wrote theirs on paper and put it in an envelope with a stamp.
This analogy doesn't make any sense. Why would a person care about nanosecond price discovery? The only benefit is for whoever controls the computers that are able to do it and profit off of it.
If that's not true then why are these firms paying so much money to have nanosecond advantages?
Why do people doing normal trading want to avoid the exchanges that have HFT computers skimming money off their trades?
There is no mutual benefit here. If there was you would be able to explain it clearly and with evidence instead of just making claims about 'price discovery'.
The price is going to get discovered either way just as it has for hundreds of years, it happening a billion times per second does normal traders no good.
What's "normal trading"? A prop desk at an investment bank? A hedge fund? A pension fund? Someone who's just installed Robin Hood on their phone?
Most rational participants want lower trading costs and overheads, smaller spreads etc. HFT provides that - the evidence being "look at what the spreads are today, compared with what they were pre computerised trading".
And you don't have to take my word for it, Vanguard thinks this too. https://www.cnbc.com/2014/04/25/vanguard-chief-defends-high-...
> The price is going to get discovered either way just as it has for hundreds of years, it happening a billion times per second does normal traders no good.
Could you explain how a market participant who makes one trade a day is negatively impacted by high resolution price discovery?
They’re negatively impacted because the SNR drops when the gain is turned up and causes algorithmic ringing to perturb the price that would be generated by high quality signal.
People who extract money by injecting algorithmic ringing into financial markets are a social parasite.
a) https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.90b.1?lang=bi&with=Introd...
I need you to understand that HFT makes decisions based on human-defined parameters. It's not AI-driven. What's the difference between a human saying "these are my parameters, now CPU, go trade based off those" versus "these are my parameters, now underling, go trade based off those"
the only difference is speed, plus i suppose those underlings might suck at following their boss's directives compared to a computer
You need me to understand something I never said anything about? No one said AI.
> > the better our discovery gets
> The better the computers hooked directly into the exchange get you mean.
This implies a distinction between "our" (i.e., humans) and "the computers." Can you explain what distinction you meant if it wasn't AI? After all, everything computers do outside AI is done pursuant to knowable, describable human control, no different from pressing keys on a keyboard.
So if you didn't mean AI, I think it's worse for your argument, not better.
The difference is that I will actually explain what I mean instead of just making claims with no evidence.
Can you explain what distinction you meant
The distinction is that the computers making millions of trades per second are owned by few people and have a huge advantage. They don't lose money and they don't hold anything.
They aren't wanted by actual people making decisions, they are there in spite of what traders buying stocks to own them actually want. They are there because they make money and from the exchange and make money for the exchange.
Retail traders are the product even though they don't want to be.
My millionth of a second is different than yours, and everyone else’s.
It is no different than buying or selling anything else. And there is no loss from the additional liquidity, you can easily set a limit at which you want to buy or sell.
No it isn't.
> I want the transaction to happen as quickly as possible. So does everyone else.
Your monitor refresh is about 16,000 times slower so you aren't going to know.
The only reason you need something faster is because you think you have to compete with other people trading on microseconds.
If matches happened at 1 second intervals you wouldn't have to worry about it at all.
This is nonsense. There is still advantage to submitting your trade as close to that settlement deadline as possible.
Except every other exchange is still revolving. The only way to implement this is to eliminate competition between exchanges.
Also, Wall Street would love this. The more of the order book you submitted, the more information you have about its composition.
There are two different things being talked about here.
Trading based on arbitrage between exchanges will happen in one way or another no matter what.
Trading millions of times per second automatically on the same exchange when some people have low latency computers at the exchange with huge amounts of extra information is not necessary.
Also, Wall Street would love this. The more of the order book you submitted, the more information you have about its composition.
The point isn't to make something 'wall street hates' it's to make something that doesn't get money eaten away by automated computers in the middle so that it's the best option for people making trading decisions on people time scales.
Why is this desirable? It seems like an argument designed only to serve the interests of a small class of person who insists on doing manual trades themselves.
The rest of what you've written just sounds like "I lost money because computers are better than me at the task." I'm not sympathetic to that concern. Computers are better than me at lots of things, so I just don't try to compete at those things. I pay people with access to the computers to do them for me, and then I focus on the things I'm good at instead. Division of labor and all that.
What are you basing this on?
I’m a former algorithmic market maker. Every plan to “slow down trades to human time scales” I’ve seen were trivially gameable. They were always proposed by a group of concerned citizens, and then jumped on by my bosses, because if the market is slowed down to pre-HFT speeds, Wall Street can make pre-HFT profits on risk-free trading again.
Do you think the internet would work better if we forcibly increased latency? If we did, if the argument were this would flatten the market and better let small websites compete with CDNs, do you think that would actually happen? Google and Cloudflare would say “oh well,” and disassemble their servers?
Our markets have structural problems. They are mostly solvable. HFT is none of them, which is why you keep hearing about it from folks who don’t want reform.
the exchanges weren't established for the abstract sake of money, they were established to provide benefit to people.
Does HFT still do this overall, or is it for the benefit of a small in-group of elite? Why is that favorable? Because we nobodies can buy the ETF?
It's explained multiple times in this very discussion. It's not our fault if you refuse to read them. But the most straightforward and obvious way is that it injects liquidity into the market, making it easier to sell when you need to liquidate. (It also reduces volatility overall, another good thing.)
> > the exchanges weren't established for the abstract sake of money, they were established to provide benefit to people.
Snort. The exchanges were established by wealthy people, for wealthy people, to engage in business with other wealthy people.
The NYSE was established in 1792. Is it your contention that anyone except the elites were buying and selling stocks in 1792? Let alone all the exchanges that pre-date the NYSE. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was set up in the 1600s specifically to facilitate the buying and selling of Dutch East India Company shares. Was Farmer Aardhuis buying shares? Or aristocrats and royalty?
Wall Street lobbies to ban HFT because HFT’s computers eat away less than traditional dealers would.
Retail investors railing against HFTs are sort of like those San Francisco types who protest new development to the benefit of their landlords.
It's nothing like that since there isn't a limited resource and everyone has access to the core purpose, which is to trade stocks.
What I notice with these discussions is that no one can actually explain why a retail investor or anyone would want computers trading underneath them millions of times a second.
At best they try to give hft credit for the automation that happened with computers anyway.
The only people that want it are the people doing it. That's not a business, that's a grift.
a) https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.90b.1?lang=bi&with=Introd...
Nope, not me. I don't mind if it takes like 20 seconds or so.
Which is fine! You can probably find a broker who will give you fee-free trading with that preference. The price you execute at won’t be as good. But unless you’re trading millions, that’s probably fine.
Thinks of it like this. When I put in a trade at human speeds based on business fundamentals, I'm not looking that the millisecond by millisecond prices, I just put in a price I am willing to accept and if the market reaches that price I get execution. HFT makes that easier and more efficient across markets by ensuring prices are converged rapidly.
How do you think it makes it harder or worse? If I put in an order to buy at $x on a particular market because I think the stock is worth more than that for business reasons, what is it about the existence of HFT that is a problem for me?
Disagree? You think milliseconds is “better” somehow?
Then by that logic microseconds are better still! (A straight-faced argument made by thousands of HFT people.)
Then, surely, nanoseconds matter. Again, some traders care deeply about shaving single digit “nanos” off their response times by using smart NICs that can respond before the incoming packet has even finished arriving! Bypassing the CPU entirely because ermahgerd that would waste precious nanos!
Okay, what about femtoseconds? Attoseconds? Low single digit Plank time units?
Clearly the extrapolation is nonsense.
The problem is that there’s always an advantage to some rent-seeker to be faster than everyone else, so there will never be consensus between them and the general public. Or each other.
It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
This is why laws are required, to prevent that one greedy guy putting “just one more cow” onto the pasture than the other greedy guys.
Open an order book. Prices and quantities aren’t decoration; they’re live telemetry for supply, demand, and how tight the crowd’s consensus is at each level. That’s information, full stop.
A human (or machine) trader forms a view of fair value against that tape. The book helps decide how to trade—size, urgency, venue—regardless of motive: arbitrage, hedge, speculation, investment, cash-out. Intent doesn’t change the math.
Prints are messages. Every execution updates everyone else’s priors. More prints → more information → smoother discovery.
Make the book sparse—only a handful of trades per day—and watch confidence collapse. With weaker consensus and wider error bars, people step back. Liquidity thins, friction rises. That’s not morality; that’s microstructure.
Time horizon doesn’t invalidate the signal. A strategy that unfolds over days and one that resolves in milliseconds both add to the dataset. If it trades, it teaches. More resolution in others’ behavior means better prices and deeper books. That’s the game.
It is not clear to me that the only economically productive information is "information about companies or economic fundamentals."
If I know some idiot is willing to pay 100x what a company is actually worth, that is economically productive because it gives me, someone better with money, a ton of resources that formerly were controlled by someone who didn't know how to leverage the assets in an economically productive manner. IT's the same argument as allowing adverse possession: transfer of assets from non-productive owners to productive owners, benefiting society as a whole.
With this, I've established a third kind of data beyond "economic fundamentals" and "information about companies."
We have some convenient "lines in the sand" that we can use as a guide:
- To make trading fair globally, the round-trip time for light around the planet could be multiplied a couple of times. That's about a second.
- The fastest possible time a human can parse the meaning of a long headline (not the full news article!) is... about a second.
- Nobody in their right mind should be buying any significant volume of shares without double-checking their order. There's no way to do this even vaguely carefully in under... a second.
Etc...
Bots trading faster than a second are trading with each other, and the only signals they have are each other.
Humans are what markets are for, not bots.
This reminds me of a story from WWII where a bunch of generals took a holiday at the same time, leaving a junior general in charge. He was in a bit of a panic because he was expecting to be overloaded with work... but found it easy. The generals were making work for each other by requesting reports, organising meetings with each other, etc...
Bots make work for bots, they generate signals for bots ever faster, to be processed by faster bots still, etc...
It's just... nonsense. Zero real information is being generated, they're just "riffing" off of the much less frequent human-initiated trades, all of which take minutes to organise and execute with due diligence.
It's like being asked to write a 10-page essay on a three-line poem.
a) https://www.sefaria.org/Bava_Batra.90b.1?lang=bi&with=Introd...
Or, maybe your strategy doesn't make money when you can trade once per minute, but does at a higher frequency.
What is fair about saying someone has to have 100x the capital to participate? You are focusing only on one dimension of cost, when there are several.
Look at why shares and the stock market were created in the place, and how many layers we laid on top of them and made the means the end and the purpose. If it takes you more than 2-3 sentences to explain something that's purely invented by humans it was probably silly to begin with.
Like the other day I was just watching a video about UTF-8. It spent a good chunk explaining all its various quirks and rules and workaround that all went back to how ASCII was dumb in some of its choices in the first place and now we're stuck with that forever.
Lol now apply this to medicine, surgery, physics, and computation next. You're using a "tree" to store data? Explain that in 2-3 sentences.
I look at them as providing a service like an energy exchange does in ensuring power distributes evenly and regularly across a region across providers and grids. They clip a fee in the middle but they provide a service in stable supply and prices.
This doesn’t mean automation isn’t without risk, and like an energy exchange, when things go badly they can go very badly. But by and large you never notice either the HFT or the energy exchange while you benefit from their existence.