HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
there is some kind of amnesia that exists with things that used to cost massive amounts but are now close to free. it is just not possible to explain to someone that in the recent past, most people were just unable to own stocks because of costs.
No, it's because people who stand to make money off it want it.
Society is full of examples of things that people want and that would save money and make a lot of sense that are blocked by people rent seeking off the status quo. Free tax filing provided by the government is one particularly obvious example.
No, the problem is that people see rent-seeking behaviour everywhere where it doesn't exist. If you think you can do it better...do it.
Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT. I'm not too bothered by that.
If you want to direct your ire somewhere, direct it at companies like Robinhood that are gamifying financial markets.
Wait till you see what the exchanges make.
Strong disagree. Liquidity at the level of milliseconds means insider trading and other information disparity is more profitable and encourages people to make rash decisions on incomplete information rather than well informed decision.
I'd love go see any information that proves that trades at the millisecond level lead to measurable improvements over, say, trades executing once per hour.
It might be harder for HFT to make money if trades were processed in random order on the hour, though they would probably still have an edge.
Online games that care about fairness try not to turn into a competition for the lowest ping time.
The government abandoning free tax filing software is GREAT for Intuit - they make a lot of money off it. It's awful for the rest of the population and the country as a whole.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
Maybe they're both bad?
I’d estimate the total global HFT revenue to be 100 billion dollars a year, which is less than Apple and a tiny percentage of all big tech combined.
Though admittedly the former have turned into pocket attention black holes (and enragement/slot machines) and Apple itself created the scourge of public Facetime calls.
Same goes for market making.
If someone is getting rich providing that service - great! Additional bonus is that it's usually very smart people getting the money.
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator The number of "devkits" is the number of chips you'll get, the number of tiles is the size of your design. You can see how many tiles current projects use here: https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
There is also a FOSSi matrix chat group: https://element.fossi-chat.org/
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.