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Comment by vecter | Hacker News Reader

That's not a very convincing argument. I'd like to participate in F1 racing, but the research and engineering costs are too high for me as an individual to partake in. If they limited racing to only 4-cylinder non-modded Hondas, it would allow me to compete in their game.

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F1 racing is a game. You're then equating stock trading with a game (a casino) when it should be serving everyone in society.

Closing off a large number of people because they lack "sophistication" is called facism. We should be striving for small c capitalism.

That's a false premise. The "purpose" of capital markets isn't to "serve society" any more so than the "purpose" of restaurants is to "serve food". Restaurants (and any other businesses for that matter) exist to generate profits. They merely satisfy that goal by serving food, but it could be done a million other ways.

The stock market exists not because of some idealized goal of serving society, but because companies want to sell partial ownership and transfer risk from themselves to the public in exchange for potential future returns on that investment. Anyone member of the public who purchases stock in a company should understand that agreement. It also has secondary benefits like providing liquidity for employees, etc., but the New York Stock Exchange wasn't founded with that purpose in mind. In other words, the stock market doesn't owe you anything.

That point aside, could you clarify how HFT hurts you? If your goal is to use stock markets as an investment vehicle, then your time horizon should be on the order of months and years, not seconds. If that's the case, then HFT has no impact on you whatsoever. If you do want to play in the second time range, then my analogy with F1 racing is perfectly applicable and there's no justification for your complaint.

That's not false - capitalism is justified by it's proponents by it's ability to serve the public better than socialism (the majority of the public wants more socialism - entitlements/public services etc). Some aspects of capitalism (copyrights, patents, HFT, pollution) are not serving the public and there are valid arguments from the opposing side.

My goal is to trade daily/weekly (in addition to monthly/yearly). I don't want to seconds/minutes/hours (and so can't many others - so the "competitiveness" of markets is actually reduced).

Ultimately, stock markets exist to raise funds for projects (exits for entrepreneurs, financing projects in large corps) - they occur on the daily-years timeframe, not seconds/minutes/hours.

You say HFT hurts the public, but you only show evidence that it hurts LFT. Why do we care about kow frewuency traders, aka parasites who profit from statistical patterns and not by contributing any value?

By that reasoning, HFT are parasites too. More generally, the stock market exists to allocate resources. Is society already so efficient that millisecond allocation needs to occur?

This is a really dumb way of looking at it. Capital markets are a tool - they are a means, not an end. They are a tool society uses to allocate resources in a sane, equitable, and efficient way. To the extent they accomplish this (and they generally do a rather great job at it), they are a useful tool. To the extent they don't, we are justified in altering the way they function so as to achieve the results we desire. They are an organizational strategy, nothing more.

What they are certainly not, is some higher order of intelligence or ideal that we humans just have to learn to live with, or else. The stock market may not owe me anything, but it certainly owes us something, or we wouldn't use it.

F1 racing is not a game, it is a major global industry. The top driver makes something like $40 million a year. Many of the advances we see in regular cars are designed and tested in those high performance vehicles.

But more importantly htf funds do not stop anyone from participating in the markets, it just harder and riskier to do so. Accounting firms had massive staffs with hundreds of binders and files for each client. Accounting software eliminated most of that. Were accountants talking about the unfair advantage that Intuit had, and how normal accountants couldn't make a living anymore? Probably. Welcome to the future.

HFT is not "automation" in the traditional sense. Stock markets exist to raise funding for projects (exits using ipo, new projects in public companies). Those occur on the day+ scale, not milliseconds. There's no point to increasing the speed of it (other than just for the sake of increasing the speed). It's like increasing the speed of the channel switching on your tv - after a certain point it's better to devote engineering resources on other aspects of the tv.

So if you owned a portfolio of stock and wanted to sell XYZ, you'd be OK if the market operated at a "day+ scale" and took 24 hours to come up with a bid price, and then if you didn't like that price you'd wait another 24 hours for the next price?

Closing off a large number of people because they lack "sophistication" is called facism

No Fascism is an authoritative, nationalistic, militaristic, socially conservative political ideaology.

Doesn't that fit under 'authoritative'?

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