Slashdot Mirror
High-Frequency Traders Are the Ultimate Hackers, Says Mark Cuban
An anonymous reader writes "Billionaire Mark Cuban talks in an interview with the Wall Street Journal about how he thinks high-frequency trading can be quite damaging to stock markets. He goes so far as to call high-frequency traders the 'ultimate hackers.' He says, 'They're running software programs that have one goal, and that's to exploit the trading systems as early and often as possible. As someone who wrote software for eight years and who keeps up very closely with the technology world, that scared the hell out of me. The only certainty in the software world is that there is no such thing as bug-free software. When software programs are trying to outsmart other software programs and hack the world's trading platforms, that is a recipe for disaster. ... How many times an hour are there failures across individual equities around the world because of software running algorithms battling each other for supremacy to make a profitable trade? We have no idea. It's not a question of if or when we have meltdowns, it's just a question of how big and where. It's straight out of War Games. And that's before we even get to the possibility of nefarious or sovereign hackers getting involved.'"
This is insulting to hackers.
It's anti-free market for sure. They're skimming off the system without contributing a damn thing and adding inefficiency and misinformation into the markets. It shouldn't be illegal, but congress should enact a transaction tax on trades that is just big enough to make HFT not worthwhile.
You're arguing that borrowers should be able to get out of their obligations
ABSOLUTELY NOT
I'm arguing that lenders should be required to prove they are the correct and lawful party to be making payments to, and the correct and lawful parties when attempting to sue someone.
The way it stands right now with securitization and loans being sold to multiple parties in some cases, you have no way of knowing if the lender claiming you owe money is really owed money in the first place.
Part of that problem was the recording of one lender selling the loan to another lender. They sped things up and got very, very, very sloppy. It should have never been possible to sell the same note twice (worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases).
Something like a minimum holding period in seconds or minutes, prohibition on naked shorts (you must borrow the security to short), and a small transaction fee to fund the enforcement mechanism would go a long way to bring sanity to the markets. Even in the commodity markets, some entity should estimate production of pork bellies or frozen concentrated orange juice or whatever and create "chips" that should be borrowed and returned to back the shorts. The shorted volume should not exceed estimated production by several times as it routinely happens now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Also, do we really want lower transaction costs? They might shave pennies or even dollars off a stock market trade, but if the point of the stock market is investment in a company (rather that shifting wealth around) wouldn't we want incentive to stay vested in a company?
The trouble with HFTs is they siphon money w/o adding value. As near as I can tell they're the definition of an economic parasite. Again, I'm open to being proven otherwise, it's just I don't see what value they add. They don't hold onto the stock long enough for the real investors to use the capital they put into the market. They just seem to drive up the cost for real investors....
As for Obama, he's got his hands full with oil and commodity speculators....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
There are definitely rich people who make a lot less money now that HFT lowers *some* transaction costs. It's therefore worth picking apart the messenger's credentials a bit.
Lowers transaction costs? Which ones!?
Two years and two days ago I used this analogy to describe HFT
Lets say you're at the supermarket.
You reach out your hand to take [product] off the shelf,
by the time you reach out to take another [product], the shelf is empty!
A HFT saw your first signal and then swept the shelf clean,
bought all of [product], and is offering to sell [product] to you at a markup.
Oh, and the HFT has done the same thing at every other supermarket you would visit.
Has the market been made more efficient?
Or is the HFT behaving like an anti-social asshole?
I'd say the answer to both questions is "yes,"
but that the needs of society outweighs the needs of the market,
which is why we have farking regulations in the first place.
The fact that we're still talking about this years later is not a good thing.
The only thing HFTers do is to sneak in between a mismatched sell and buy order so that they can steal pennies.
The stock market got along fine without high frequency trading and there's absolutely no reason to hang onto it now,
except that it profits a bunch of 1%-ers on Wall Street and their lobbyists.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I'm sorry but have you seen who's working at the Federal Reserve or the FDIC? Bankers and Wallstreet CEOs, that's who. The banks and the government are the same guys and the line between them is no more. Regulation? Hahahahahahahahh... what a quaint notion. We got here through Capitalism... because corporations want power and they can rig the government game in their favor. Its time for something completely different and I don't mean a penguin on the telly!
Long term investing isn't gambling, but day-trading most certainly is. The number of factors that go into a stock price's short term movements are so numerous as to be incomprehensible. You'd have better luck predicting a coin toss based on starting velocity, wind speed, ambient humidity, etc., than you would predicting a stock's day-to-day movement based on all available data.
Done "correctly," HFC is bad for society because, like insider trading done "correctly," it specifically screws the "have nots" to benefit the "haves."
Yes, the screwed-up trades are a problem, but those are the side-show. The real problem is that those with the ability to do HFC can use that ability to "jump ahead in line" and screw those who don't have this ability.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Quo vadis?
I get that if an arbitrageur who performs the classic arbitrage of buying a stock on one exchange and selling it on another where it's trading at a higher price is effectively connecting willing buyers and sellers who would agree on a price if they all had access to a common exchange. I also get that arbitrages on derivatives make the prices of related securities more internally consistent (not necessarily better, just more consistent).
What function does HFT serve in the market? The common answer I've heard is that they provide liquidity, that is, that they provide counter parties for trades that other people were looking to make, but if they exit that position within milliseconds by making the reverse trade to someone else, that means they only acted as a middleman between two willing parties that would have found each other in a short time anyway. I don't see how you can provide liquidity without having an openended commitment to sitting on an open long or short position the way a traditional marketmaker does. So how does this HFT provide liquidity that wasn't already there, and if it isn't providing that, what useful function is it serving?
The problem with programmed trading at these levels is that it prioritizes arbitrage over the health of the companies the market is supposed to serve.
Exploiting actual arbitrage opportunities would contribute to the health of the market itself, surely! But what makes you think that is what trading bots are doing? Aren't they simply scalping miniscule price movements at extremely high frequency?
I think that Cuban is wrong when he dismisses arguments that high frequency traders are providing markets with liquidity, clearly they are. And I think that software bugs in trading programs would sound primarily in reduced profits for their operators. However, I think he is correct to be concerned. As trading is increasingly conducted on the basis of tiny price movements without any regard to the underlying equities, and that at higher frequency and quantity, markets are being exposed to mass phenomena and feedbacks which have the potential to dislodge the performance of equities from the underlying performance of the actual companies, perhaps to disastrous consequences.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
I think that Cuban is wrong when he dismisses arguments that high frequency traders are providing markets with liquidity, clearly they are. And I think that software bugs in trading programs would sound primarily in reduced profits for their operators.
*Cough* - Remember the flash crash? If anything, it showed that HFT is the market. Trading volumes have grown exponentially since derivatives and HFT went mainstream. It's not going to end well.
Plus, how HFT screws casual traders is absolutely abject. Joe wants to sell X for $9.99, Jack wants to buy it at $10.01. Instead of letting Joe and Jack do their trade normally, allowing Joe to pocket an extra $0.02, the algo (which is located at the market maker's premesis, to get the info in advance) discovers Joe's price by issuing tiny trades, and buys at $10 from Joe. It then immediately sells to Jack at $10.01, discovering his price in the same manner. People should be running around with pitchforks over this.