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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."
Buy gold.
(Half in sarcasm, since if the world economy collapses totally, it would probably be better to have something like, say, food.)
before problems arise? Have you not been paying attention for the last two years?
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
That's one of the stupidest comments I've ever heard on here. No, really. It is.
Long term investment is the POINT of a stock market. It's to encourage the private sector to ALLOCATE MONEY EFFICIENTLY toward PRODUCTIVE activity. Shuffling money around constantly and making the only "productive" part the cut you get for the shuffling (not the actual thing you invested in) completely defeats that purpose. It's called RENT SEEKING by the banks and traders, and it's a BAD THING. It encourages money to be allocated poorly in a short sited fashion, only doing whatever will make the most commission for the trader and his company. It does the opposite of what the stock market was supposed to do.
Great googly moogly have people become so blinded by day trading as to think making money on the trading was the point of the market? If that's the way you're thinking, then just withdraw your life's savings from the bank, drive your ass to Las Vegas, and start "investing". You can be well ahead of Wall Street's curve on what they're trying to sustain: a massive legalized national casino.
Some people are mentally defective and will only be happy when they have more than others. Two such persons and they'll keep fighting eachother until everybody loses.
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This is one of the best comments I've read about this issue.
Too many people see things exactly as you describe. The "market" is just an abstraction, they don't make the connection to the real world companies that they are investing in because they don't see that as the point anymore. It used to be that you could take a small amount of money, invest it in a company with a good idea - along with many other people - and you could profit from it too. Getting money to people with good ideas, and letting people who could never start their own company have a chance to be involved in the process of business, that was the goal. Now, Wall Street is about finding new ways to creatively move, funnel, transfer, shuffle, and convert money so that when it comes out of the other side of the black box it's more than you started with. It might as well be a casino, instead of a random number generator or dice you have the ups and downs of real companies creating the random seed.
It would be funny if not for the fact that the rest of the US, the world really, are subsidizing this farce and allowing these people to get rich doing nothing productive.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
The same banks that perform HFT also act as brokers. They know where everybody's stop losses are. They can run your stops and cause you to sell, while triggering other people to sell the market short, then run the market back up and cause the shorts to cover, and cause you to buy again so you don't miss out. Rinse and repeat.
this system rewards people who produce nothing of value, make nothing, enrich no one's lives, do not create art, do not expand the sphere of human knowledge, and provide no meaningful service to humanity or the country.
If only it were so simple. Efficient allocation of capital is extremely useful. It enables all kinds of progressive development that would never occur otherwise and stock markets (and derivative markets) are the best way humanity has come up with to do it. You might as well be arguing that farmers' markets and cattle auctions are just as useless - all they do is provide a meeting place and a means to buy and sell - they create nothing.
It should come as no surprise that the system can and is abused - that's pretty much the case for every system man has ever come up with. But to argue that capital markets are nothing more than siphons from the poor to the rich is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The trickle has taken on a decidedly yellow tinge.
4 seconds is too long to leave an opportunity of more efficient reallocation of capital unexploited, yet there are people who have been unemployed for over a year? This implies that we've created an economic system where it is a more efficient use of resources to rearranging ownership of theoretical constructs than finding a place in society for people who have none? Doesn't it seem that we've sort of lost sight of what the purpose of an economy is?