Sudden Demand For Logicians On Wall Street

An anonymous reader writes "In an unexpected development for the depressed market for mathematical logicians, Wall Street has begun quietly and aggressively recruiting proof theorists and recursion theorists for their expertise in applying ordinal notations and ordinal collapsing functions to high-frequency algorithmic trading. Ordinal notations, which specify sequences of ordinal numbers of ever increasing complexity, are being used by elite trading operations to parameterize families of trading strategies of breathtaking sophistication. The monetary advantage of the current strategy is rapidly exhausted after a lifetime of approximately four seconds — an eternity for a machine, but barely enough time for a human to begin to comprehend what happened. The algorithm then switches to another trading strategy of higher ordinal rank, and uses this for a few seconds on one or more electronic exchanges, and so on, while opponent algorithms attempt the same maneuvers, risking billions of dollars in the process."

Comments

Re:Self regulating?

[pyalot]

I think you mistake traditional practice with "was intended to". Please show me the writ, paper, law or stated intend that markets derive their right of existence to long term investment?

Weather you like it or not, markets come into existence not because some founding fathers sat together and wrote some noble goal onto parchment, but because somebody has something to sell, which somebody else might want to buy. And even tough you might not like it if long term investment becomes meaningless, this is merely a function of the times we're living in where ALL things are more volatile, the markets merely reflect and amplify that.

Now as far as stupid goes, you should perform some serious navel gazing there, because you project your own failed expectations onto a changed reality. Stupid is, to expect reality to behave like you'd like it to.