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Ex-Goldman Sachs Programmer Found Guilty
Readers twoallbeefpatties and ngrier wrote in essentially simultaneously about the guilty verdict in the trial of former Goldman Sachs computer programmer Sergey Aleynikov. We've discussed the case several times before. The trial itself was sealed from the public to prevent discussion of GS's high-frequency trading system. Reader ngrier summarizes: "After just three hours of deliberation, the jury found Sergey Aleynikov guilty of intentionally stealing proprietary Goldman Sachs code. As he had admitted copying the code as he was preparing to join a startup competitor in 2009, the case hinged on the intent. He faces up to 10 years in prison."
Why not just link to his profile? I’m sure he really wanted all the e-mail anyway...
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
Maybe it's his name? Nick Grier?
High frequency trading has no social benefit. If wikileaks could leak all source code of that type I would applaud it.
Again, like the lady in a previous "story" today, this guy clearly committed a crime, was busted, got convicted.
News? Not really.
Neither of these are nearly as "tasty" as the ass-hat who worked for SF...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Steal from a few hundred million, get fat bonuses....
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
Goldman Sachs are the criminals. Why aren't they all on trial too? All this guy did was steal a little code. They've been robbing their customers for years.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
Ten years for just stealing a little code. Damn you would think he gambled with investor funds on risky phantom products that sent the whole economy into a tail spin. But I guess that's what they call their business model.
To steal, one must take something from another's possession, and deprive them of its use. What he did was illegal, as the jury found. However, if all he did was copy the code, as opposed to destroying the originals and all versioned/archived/backed-up copies, then he didn't steal anything. The MAFIAA (Music and Film Industry Associations of America) would like you to think that what this man did was steal, because it's a short hop to apply the same logic from code to music and film. They'd be wrong.
I'm Ann Grier!
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
High frequency trading actually facilitates more accurate pricing of securities because of the liquidity it introduces to the market.
That is only true in a normal market. BUT, when the markets crash, all those computers jump on board and sell thereby eliminating liquidity and that's why the markets have "circuit breakers".
Free markets only work when within narrow bands. The last couple of years has proven that to be true.
Look up conversion. More specifically, theft by conversion.
Once you think you understand it, read about it again, then come back and talk to us.
To steal, one must take something from another's possession, and deprive them of its use. What he did was illegal, as the jury found. However, if all he did was copy the code, as opposed to destroying the originals and all versioned/archived/backed-up copies, then he didn't steal anything. The MAFIAA (Music and Film Industry Associations of America) would like you to think that what this man did was steal, because it's a short hop to apply the same logic from code to music and film. They'd be wrong.
Yes, he DID deprive them of something. He deprived them of their ability to control the source code that they owned.
As if 10 year potential for stealing code was not rediculous enough what it's for is really depressing. This is code not for a secret missle system or sub prop design. It is code to enable high frequency trading.
An activity which serves no useful purpose of any kind except to suck money out of the system with nothing to show for it in return. The industry can take their liquidity argument and shove it.
How many automated stock disasters must occur before before the lobbying dollars necessary to maintain this shit loose their effectiveness?
high frequency trading demands you have the screamiest servers the shortest fibre optic hop away from wall street. meaning it turns what should be an egalitarian marketplace of equals into one where those with the most power and resources are able to extract a tax of sorts on regular traders by engaging in high speed tricks
just put a "heartbeat" into the market: all trades operate on a FIFO queue that is released on a regular interval: every 3 seconds, every second, every 10 seconds, every 500 milliseconds, whatever: the point simply being that no trades can operate faster than this "heartbeat", thereby putting all trades on an equal footing
otherwise, the stock market will be abused by its richest players. when that happens, small time and mom and pop stock market traders will feel abused, and opt out, and the market will ossify into corruption
the point of a well-regulated marketplace is to keep the marketplace fair and healthy and a place of equals. so deny the powerful this unfair leverage and unfair ability to siphon off a tax on all other traders just by doing little fast tricky trades that have no real value whatsoever other than to take money from the slower smaller players
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Which part of this is theft by conversion? Just for kicks I walked across the hall and cracked a legal book to refresh my memory. I don't see how this applies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
is the fact that we have apparent non-experts deciding whether what he took was in fact proprietary, and the case is sealed so we cannot judge for ourselves. On the other hand, if what he took was legitimately open source, how comes it he couldn't have downloaded that elsewhere and saved himself a trial?
Dog is my co-pilot.
I suggest you do the same as Theft by Conversion does not exist. Specifically you mean 'Criminal Conversion' which is not theft.
you are right, he "borrowed" it.
No you didn't. Theft by Conversion is the unlawful use of another's property for personal gain whether it deprives someone of property or decreases any value or not.
Go back 20 years when we had market makers. They would make 12.5 cents on every trade. It was a de facto monopoly.
HFT have replaced the formal market makers. They, on average, make a small fraction of a penny on every trade. They make money on huge volumes. The spreads have dropped and liquidity has increased.
So
Increased Liquidity - Fact
Decreased Spreads – Fact
Increased daily volatility? - Probably
I suggest you learn a little more about the law for you are wrong. Not only is it a law, it's specifically encoded as a law titled Theft by conversion in many states.
the point of hft is to scalp the market all day every day, in effect ripping off mom and pop investors of a few pennies every time they execute a transaction. I realize the big boys pay a lot to keep the lie alive but please post your b.s elsewhere.
Actually, the second company I joined needed QA for a project that was in trouble. Meanwhile, one of the engineers left the company, taking the source code with him. He started another company, completed the project and began selling it before we did. I never had contact with engineers nor with source code: since the horse already escaped they slammed every door shut, not just the barn door. I could never get an engineer to fix a bug because they would just claim it worked on their workstation, so it couldn't possibly be a bug.
The other company leveraged their market potential to buy two other start-ups. When they were convicted of theft of trade secrets, they were forced to divest of their ill-gotten assets, but they kept going with the products of the other two companies that they "merged" with. So they continued to compete against us; that is, until we bought them. A classic case of steal-from-your-boss-and-get-rewarded-for-it.
i don't understand your post. you agree with my description of the problem, but call my solution bullshit. why? because you shouldn't fight corruption, you should just accept it? is that your ignorant attitude?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
so basically you're saying trading should be more like a turn-based RPG and less like a twitchy FPS?
The Taiwan and Korea markets are like that, the only thing such delays achieve is to decrease the total amount of shares traded in a day, hence reduces the overall market value and shifts wealth to other markets that do allow continuous unfettered trading.
What you don't realise is that a great deal of shares/commodities these days are being traded in dark pools and mini electronic markets, those traditional NYSE or NASDAQ style exchanges are looking to be a thing of the past and only being used as a reporting medium for the exchange of shares from external/independent markets.
I say let the markets be as efficient as they can be.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
If data are lost, and you do not have a backup copy, you can be prosecuted for negligence.
If data are not lost, and you do have a backup copy, you can be prosecuted for stealing.
I have actually personally experienced both scenarios, but fortunately in a country that is less sue happy than USA.
The worst one, was when all the workstations were stolen, including backups.
I and my colleague restored everything from personal backups, and thus the company was saved, and still exists.
Conclusion: Lawyers hate us and want to hurt us. The law is just an excuse.
Time to make them obsolete.
The Constitution requires a speedy *and public* trial.
Even government classified information is not exempt.
Very true. The concept of value investing has been long lost to the market. If any of you are traders, or if you are looking at getting into trading, I recommend checking out the book Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor by Seth A. Klarman.
:)
I read this book, and after was astounded with how true it rings, not because of the money I earned (I don't even invest), but because of the insights it provides into the greediness and irrational nature of the market.
To summarize the book, buys stocks based on what you think their value is, which actually requires doing a value analysis on the stock and buying when it is undervalued, and selling when it is overvalued, as to just getting sucked into the latest get rich quick stock or bond at the height of its balloon, only to have it pop.
Good luck finding a copy under $500 dollars. This is a rarity. It was once deemed the most stolen book from libraries in the world by the NYT.
But I may have seen it available on torrents before
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
'small time and mom and pop stock market traders will feel abused, ...
But they read Rupert's Financial times, with the stocks from before yesterday and it also has financial psychics predicting the future, you can't beat that?
"If you're going to commit crimes, son, start with the legal ones."
This was at Crocker Bank in the 80s, which was subsequently bought by Wells Fargo, who laid off thousands, including me. When that happened, I suddenly saw his point.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
LOL
i'm showing my age, but there was a mod some maniac made over ten years ago of id's original doom fps. you were let loose in a level full of monsters, and each monster correlated with a process running on your computer. when you shot a monster (with a shotgun, preferably), the process associated with that sprite was terminated as well. brilliant, and insane
now i want to see someone write a mod where you execute trades instead of processes. that would brilliant and insane x10
i think on the original mod there was a label floating above each sprite's head, so you knew what process you were terminating. although, it would be more fun if there was no label, so you wouldn't know if you were going to freeze your os, crash the system, or just end some minor helper service. likewise, with a trader fps mod, you should just go into the level with a shotgun and a bunch of sprites, not knowing if you blowing a couple of thousand on a major amount of a tanking stock, or making $10 off a useless tiny put option trade, or whatever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Theft by conversion *does* deprive the owner of his own property.
Because for the conversion to take place *someone else* must have possession of that property.
For example:
SCO sells licenses for SCO Unix. They do this on behalf of Novell.
They are to remit 100 percent of the fee to Novell, and Novell is to give them 5 percent as the seller's fee.
SCO proceeds to hold on to every fucking license fee, including the ridiculous ones they sold to Microsoft and Sun.
SCO holds on to these through bankruptcy. Using the money to fund its lawsuits and operating expenses.
Ergo, theft by conversion. Novell is out the money it rightly deserves. It has been *deprived of ownership* by SCO.
http://dictionary.law.com/Default.aspx?selected=346
conversion
n. a civil wrong (tort) in which one converts another's property to his/her own use, which is a fancy way of saying "steals." Conversion includes treating another's goods as one's own, holding onto such property which accidentally comes into the convertor's (taker's) hands, or purposely giving the impression the assets belong to him/her. This gives the true owner the right to sue for his/her own property or the value and loss of use of it, as well as going to law enforcement authorities since conversion usually includes the crime of theft.
See also: theft
--
BMO
Oops, I suggest you learn a LOT more about law because if you look at the USC you will see there is no such thing as 'Theft by Conversion' nor was he indicted or convicted on such nonsense.
This isn't a state case where their made up backwater bullshit would apply, this is a federal case where the big kids get to play, now go home.
efficient?
you are basically advocating for shady marketplaces that are rigged by their most entrenched players. if the markets are not egalitarian, the markets are abusive, and you are cursing the entire concept of trading to the realm of corruption, which will decrease the overall market value a heck of a lot more than what taiwan and korea are suffering, i assure you
for a market to be truly free, that is, a meeting place of equals, it must be in the full light of day and be highly regulated. truly "free" marketplaces, that is, without any regulation at all, are, as a rule, dominated, abused, and taxed by their largest most powerful players
a marketplace that is regulated and transparent and well-policed and well-understood, is a marketplace that attracts investors with confidence and trust in what they are getting into. your dark marketplaces meanwhile are more a deal of who you know. the definition of nepotism and all manner of ills that befall fools that get involved in such financial chicanery
your way is the way of financial doom. you are ignorant of financial history. the fate of such dark marketplaces is well understood and oft repeated throughout history
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From the information in the article, I'm not sure I understand what the case is based on? If the code was open-source, doesn't he have license to use it?
Are they claiming that the "open source" code is actually proprietary and cannot be used by anyone? Or that just their employees cannot use it? Or that the contract between him and the employer somehow prevents licensing the open source code? The article claimed there was no question that he violated the confidentiality agreement. Or did he disclose some proprietary information while copying the "open source" code? Or is the case not based on their ownership of the code that was copied, but something else? Or did he copy it directly from their servers and not use the "open source" versions of the code from external sources?
Guess there are many unanswered questions in this article. But guess it's difficult to understand how big organisation's rules work. Maybe there are some rules that are difficult to understand by normal open source developers. (but if the rules are difficult to understand, how they expect people to follow them?) Banks might have different rules compared to normal companies? More strict maybe...
Good luck finding a copy under $500 dollars.
Surely an investor, of all people, should see the value in doing another print run!
Try spread betting on for size. It's like gambling the farm at the casino, only for higher stakes!
see:
http://www.igindex.co.uk/
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Change "does" to "can" and I'm with you.
You see, I can wait until your at work and barrow your lawn mower and other things, take a loan out using them as collateral, then give them back without you ever knowing it or me starting them or anything. That would be the same ordeal.
Another theft by conversion might be where you give me money to invest in a certain way, I in turn invest it differently making more then you expected and keep the differences. On the surface, You got what you expected and your money back so you lost nothing. However, legally, I took your property and converted it for personal use without your permission.
Hey, it's the American way!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Dude, whatever you're smokin, do you have any left?
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
You *ARE NOT* "Michael Kristopeit", you are some loser splashing his info all over Slashdot because you have some personal issue with him. Juvenal trolling. Do you even know You "Michael Kristopeit" phone number? Probably not.
Does that liquidity remain when the market collapses as it did in May because of high frequency trading? Hell no, those HFT firms are the first to hit HF STOP into their console when shit gets real.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/how-hft-quote-stuffing-caused-market-crash-may-6-and-threatens-destroy-entire-market-any-mom
Real market makers maintain liquidity during a crisis. HFT firms are parasites.
Face it, it had to be said.
Lol.. Perhaps you should learn a lot lot lot more because USC isn't the only law covering the jurisdiction of the US.
high frequency trading demands you have the screamiest servers the shortest fibre optic hop away from wall street. meaning it turns what should be an egalitarian marketplace of equals into one where those with the most power and resources are able to extract a tax of sorts on regular traders by engaging in high speed tricks
Why should a market be egalitarian in your sense? You could, like anyone else, always spend for the faster link.
Read that again:
conversion
n. a civil wrong (tort) in which one converts another's property to his/her own use, which is a fancy way of saying "steals." Conversion includes treating another's goods as one's own, holding onto such property which accidentally comes into the convertor's (taker's) hands, or purposely giving the impression the assets belong to him/her. This gives the true owner the right to sue for his/her own property or the value and loss of use of it, as well as going to law enforcement authorities since conversion usually includes the crime of theft.
See also: theft
Especially the part about "purposely giving the impression the assets belog to him/her." Now you can see that changing "can" is not a requirement for conversion to apply in your lawn mower example.
.. on all these high frequency trading systems. Most of them achieve high speed, low latency trading by submitting batches of trade requests to the electronic exchanges. Somewhere in the transaction, the decision is made to go ahead with a subset of the trades. The rest of them are cancelled. This borders on a DoS attack.
If I pulled some nonsense like this with my ISP or other service provider, they'd have something in their TOS to throw me off the system for making bogus requests.
Have gnu, will travel.
Your statement about the Taiwan and Korea markets is nonsensical. Why does using a heart beat type trading decrease the total amount of shares traded in a day? And why would that have anything to do with the overall market value?
Regarding the dark pools, if you thought about it for a second, you would realize that those dark pools are partially caused by exactly the high frequency trading you support. People do not want to suffer the tax of the HFTs on the big exchanges, so they trade outside of them in dark pools. Of course this causes all kinds of inefficiencies. If the central markets like NASDAQ and NYSE were fair, and had low transaction costs, more people would trade there and that would make our economy much more efficient as buyers would more easily find sellers to get the best price for all parties involved.
No, you _stole_ the lawnmower. Taking without permission is theft, whether I am there to see it or not.
If you're my buddy and you take my car out for a ride, without telling me, and you get stopped, and the cops call me up to ask if you had permission (since you know me) I would well be within my rights to tell them "no, he stole it" and away you go. I may be an asshole, but you stole the car.
But in your example, not only do you steal my fucking lawnmower, you use it to commit fraud upon the fucking bank. Considering how bogus loans brought down the economic house of cards, I hope they throw the book at you and put you away for 20 years.
Conversion is theft. Even though it's theft by another name doesn't make it any less than a theft. It's like how a half truth is really a lie.
And two half truths do not make a whole truth, or a whole lie. They are two lies. They multiply instead of add.
--
BMO
says you.
I can think of one -- Free Market. As in free to invest, free to lose your house. Fascists need not apply.
--
damaged by dogma
Surely an investor, of all people, should see the value in doing another print run!
Well, yeah....Unless it bombed when originally released at $25 and he has a shitload of them in his basement and is slowly trying to get rid of them at $500+ a pop :p
Google: margin of safety filetype:pdf That was tough.
I think you misunderstood my point, all the examples I gave such as separate mini markets, stealth exchange and clearing pools are all elements that existed in past markets that inevitably all failed.
The idea is if you allow people the freedom to choose from these options over time such options will fail - that is a certainty. The reason for failure centers around the fact that as they reduce the overall efficiency (true price) of the market, this results in a less profitable market.
For example dark-pools were invented to reduce the undesired market impact that large players may create when trying to offload large orders in a short amount of time (good idea keep the market steady) - From a technical pov its working fine today, most of the major IBs provide such services, and it is true that such services skew the true value of stocks, however as more and more people begin to utilize them, the value of such dark-pools and their advantages begin to dissipate, same can be said for the mini-emarkets.
When someone says let the markets be free, they're not talking about an "everyone is equal" paradigm but rather "let them do what they will" and let the outcomes decide. The markets are ruthless, most people are culled out of the competition before they can even blink, and unlike most other national services such as public schools and hospitals - they are not designed nor willing to cater to the lowest common denominator (be that due to intelligence, server speed or lack of optic fiber), in short they are not fair, they were never intended to be fair, making them fair will make the unprofitable - all any one government can do is regulate certain use-cases that make participating in said market unpalatable, such as insider trading/front-running.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
High frequency trading should be a crime. It does not contribute one iota to the original goal of the stock market; however it sucks wealth from it - more precisely, from long-term shareholders. Goldman-Sachs and the like are nothing but leeches. (GS is a leech, in more ways than one, actually)
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
there was a mod some maniac made over ten years ago of id's original doom fps. you were let loose in a level full of monsters, and each monster correlated with a process running on your computer. when you shot a monster (with a shotgun, preferably), the process associated with that sprite was terminated as well.
psDooM
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
egalitarian marketplace of equals
Hahahahahaha - LOL - yeah... but really, c'mon now. Seriously, what ever gave you the idea that the market was a place for equals. It never has been and never will be
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
We could make the police a lot more efficient too. Remove all the beurocratic requirements and protections; let them do wiretaps without a warrant, don't allow people to have lawyers, allow them to plant evidence, and torture suspects into confessing their crimes. Take away the presumption of innocense too. I guarantee that the police will be much more efficient at prosecuting people and getting them thrown in jail if we do that. Let the police be as efficient as they can be!
Unless of course, what you want is for only guilty people to be thrown into jail, in which case removing all the protections and procedures we have in place will actually reduce the police's effectiveness.
Maybe you should think about what it is the markets are actually efficient at doing, and what it is you actually want them to do.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
Seeing as you're promoting a book and telling us how valuable it is, and that it's out of print, are you Seth A Klarman? or somebody sitting on a pile of copies of his book?
The 1 star reviews in amazon (including one by somebody who has read a library copy) make the interesting suggestion that the mythologising of the book gives it its value, rather than the content itself. Sounds like Seth A Klarman is making his money not from his wise investment strategies but from selling books which cost him 10 dollars to purchase from the publisher at 500 plus dollars to the seller. Good business model!
I'd also query the NYTimes ability to know what the most stolen library books are around the whole world. I don't believe a journalist in New York would have written to the national library associations of 200 plus countries and collated that information.
And they came back within the hour. Real market makers would have precipitated a proper meltdown, with repercussions for everyone who wasn't an HFT.
Someone arrest this man!
is that it's pretty similar to what everyone else on the street does. In the end, they hire the same people, from the same universities, to make money in the same way. These people then move around among the same firms. The only reason we can't compare is of course that all the code is secret.
GS are just pretending the guy's stuff is valuable. And maybe it seems like it too, when you can't see everyone else's stuff.
He wrongfully assumed a right to use computer code (and sought to derive value from it), in violation of the terms of his employment.
And I didn't even have to walk across the hall and [blah...blah...blah...]
"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Reagan
Govt must constitute a panel to rewrite US Constitution and Quran
To summarize the book, buys stocks based on what you think their value is, which actually requires doing a value analysis on the stock and buying when it is undervalued, and selling when it is overvalued, as to just getting sucked into the latest get rich quick stock or bond at the height of its balloon, only to have it pop.
The problem is that the market can be wrong longer than you can be right. That is to say it doesn't help if you sit on a stock that is constantly undervalued, you never get the "real" value unless you buy it out and go private which is not an option for 99.999% of us. The question is what brings markets to say "Hey, this stock is vastly underpriced, buy buy buy." or "Hey, this stock is vastly overpriced, sell sell sell." because unless you're doing it for the dividends you're sooner or later going to sell it back into the same market. And you should also be aware that you can still lose money if the market is falliing at the same time, even if the stock performed better than the index. It should even out over time but it adds volatility. It's not that simple to ignore what the market overall is doing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
said could be used by others to manipulate the market?
the guy with the most money gets the fastest link
therefore, only those already with a lot of money can make more money
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the problem is when only those with a lot of money can make more money
i have no problem with the ruthless, social darwinistic crawl to the top of the shitpile. hey, let capitalism be capitalism
but i, or anyone else who is interested in healthy capitalism, have a problem with the guy already at the top of the shitpile shoving everyone else back, and staying there, by no virtue of cunning or ruthlessness or hardwork, but just because of his entrenched position. that's not capitalism
if the markets are not egalitarian, they are not markets, they are a series of assholes engaging in rent-seeking from fools
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, you let me barrow your lawnmower as has been a long standing arrangement in which you allowed me to use it whenever I needed. I just used it for purposes not outlines in our standing arrangement.
But lets go beyond that, lets say your property buts up to mine and there is no fence or physical marker for anyone else to casually determine where one property ends and the other starts, I just pointed to the mower and said use that as collateral, and the entity giving the loan did because they assumed it was mine and my property as I represented it that way. In this case, your mower never left the spot you put it in, but I still derived or converted your property to mine for this purpose. You have never lost control over it unless I fail to pay my loan back.
Conversion is theft, I won't argue with that. However the theft doesn't have to be a tangible good, it could simply be a value or benefit the property potentially provided. An example of this is a politician who steers bond money into his own brokerage house at a guaranteed fixed 3% interest for the purpose of using that money on risky investments and making 13% interest. This would be theft by conversion of a political officer and the government office that the investment was made in the name of wouldn't/might not, have lost anything at all.
No, you let me barrow your lawnmower as has been a long standing arrangement in which you allowed me to use it whenever I needed
Facts not in evidence from the previous message.
I am not going to play Calvinball with you.
--
BMO
the guy with the most money gets the fastest link
therefore, only those already with a lot of money can make more money
So you assume that just because there is a slight advantage to the wealthy, that you've lost the ability to make money. I don't see any reason to agree.
"slight advantage"
LOL
you're funny
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It doesn't matter. You were trying to say what I said wasn't true because of a specific matter within the specific situation and I was trying to say that the general concept and law doesn't require the actual taking of property. Just because I presented a scenario wrong doesn't take away from that concept. There is no need to deprive someone of physical property take in order for conversion to happen. We could agure and introduce all sorts of things to make a specific made up scenario fit that or not, it's just pointless because that specific scenario was just an illustration of the concept.
The access into hft markets has becomes tremendously easier in the last 10 years and continues to drop, allowing more and more investors to participate if they wish. There is no such thing as a fake trade, if someone buys or sells they are on the hook and are taking risk even if for a fraction of a second.
Which brings us full circle in that HFT is not harming mom and pop investors. It feels like everybody on Slashdot thinks they are getting some kind of rough deal because they haven't invested millions of dollars into trading infrastructure and so can't compete on the same level, but normal investors aren't even in the same game. They want the best price they can get when they move in and out of a position no matter which market they participate on, and HFT makes that happen in the most efficient way possible, probably in human history.
People who argue that HFT adds nothing are woefully ignorant of how market prices converge and how all information is priced into the market. Individuals should be much more wary of being forced to do business through banks, brokers, and other third parties in a 'fair' regulated system. If you want to ensure that the average person pays the most possible per transaction by all means replace hft with some high regulated and by definition inefficient approach to the markets.