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Congress Passes BOTS Act To Ban Ticket-Buying Software (arstechnica.com)
Congress passed a bill yesterday that will make it illegal for people to use software bots to buy concert tickets. Ars Technica reports: The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act makes it illegal to bypass any computer security system designed to limit ticket sales to concerts, Broadway musicals, and other public events with a capacity of more than 200 persons. Violations will be treated as "unfair or deceptive acts" and can be prosecuted by the Federal Trade Commission or the states. The bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent last week, and the House of Representatives voted yesterday to pass it as well. It now proceeds to President Barack Obama for his signature. Computer programs that automatically buy tickets have been a frustration for the concert industry and fans for a few years now. The issue had wide exposure after a 2013 New York Times story on the issue. Earlier this year, the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman completed an investigation into bots. The New York AG's ticket sales report (PDF) found that the tens of thousands of tickets snatched up by bots were marked up by an average of 49 percent.
other than that it is done by broker bots instead of scalper bots?
Is this the type of an issue you are thinking about when you cast your vote? Who out there is thinking: "I really need the government to exist so that it could set up laws to prevent people from buying concert tickets with bots"?
You can't handle the truth.
Free market dictates that ticket companies that can't protect themselves from bots should go out of business and be replaced by ones that can. This is major government overreach. TRUMP!
Good point. High Frequency Trading should be treated the same way. It won't be. But it should be.
100,000 people want to go to a concert that only has 20,000 tickets.
Scalpers collectively hire 100,000 "mechanical turks" to try to snap up tickets.
They still wind up with half of the tickets.
The only reason this problem exists is because people will pay more than the face value for tickets. If everyone just said no these jerks would get stuck with all those tickets and not be able to recoup their costs and they'd go away on their own. No government intervention required. In fact, I'd love to see empty venues for a few shows while these assholes take a bath.
The BOTS on Wall Street are owned by people with considerably more money so they are safe from any legal consequence.
I want to buy tickets to events, and then I have to tack on another $20~$40 in fees on top of an already > $100 ticket. Then I don't buy it because it's beyond what I think my budget should be. Maddening.
Very-high-demand events should sell tickets by dutch auction.
At least this way, the promoters and others running the event - who are likely to plow some of their profits back into the business - keep most of "true" value of the ticket, not the scalpers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Good point. High Frequency Trading should be treated the same way. It won't be. But it should be.
HFC enhances market liquidity. Most forms of HFC reduce arbitrage across different markets. Sure, we could go back in time and use the Pony Express to deliver mail but what about progress?
I think we should look ahead to the day when anyone trying to game a stock market is taken outside, stripped naked, and their testicles are plugged into a car battery, but that's just me.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Does Congress not have more important things to do than meddle in people buying and reselling products?
Tickets are scarce. Yesterday they were allocated to people with the most money. Today they're allocated to people with enough free time to hit F5 on the web site the day they go on sale.
People buy and mark up products all the time (that's what wholesalers, distributors, and retailers do all day). Why should we consider tickets any different? If you don't like markup going to resellers instead of artists, tell the artists to have more shows or set the initial price higher. It's a problem the artists and venues could solve all by themselves if they wanted to.
This reminds me of the time the federal government decided to Ban sliced bread,
because they fancied maybe there could be some savings or economic benefit.
The government has no business regulating ticket sales differently than any other kind of product sales.
Obviously the tickets are underpriced in the first place, if people are willing to do this, they're correcting a market distortion.
The bots could be stopped in their tracks a few different ways without needing to pass laws about them.
Why only bots? Why not blacks, whites or muslims?
Going to load them all on a train to a recycling camp next?
A possible solution is to not ban sales to bots per-se, but instead verify that the identity of the person redeeming the ticket at the door is the same as the person who purchased the ticket (via verifying CC details, or even something as basic as their name).
If tickets have conditions on them that prevent their usage by anyone other than the person who originally bought them, then there can be no market for resold tickets. Let the scalpers buy as many tickets as they want, but eliminate the market for them to be resold.
Ticket Australia now state as part of their conditions of sale "This ticket may not, without the prior written consent of Ticketek or the Seller, be resold at a premium or used for advertising, promotion or other commercial purposes (including competitions and trade promotions) or to enhance the demand for other goods or services. If a ticket is sold or used in breach of this condition, the bearer of the ticket will be refused admission."
If you knowingly purchase a scalped ticket, you're taking a huge risk that you won't get in to the event.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
If the tickets are being sold for $60, but people are willing to pay $150, then why aren't they offered first for $150? I see the big problem being the middlemen sucking money out without adding value. Let the entertainers get that money.
If I were in charge of tickets for something like a pro sports team, the system I would use would be to put the tickets on sale at some ridiculous price, and announce that the price would drop 1% every four hours, or something like that. Then if you want the perfect seats and don't care that they're $1000, you can get your pick on the first day. Wait a few weeks, and they're $500. Wait until the day of the game, and anything left is $20. There's no need to set different prices on the better seats--they will sell earlier at a higher price.
A system like that would make scalping at a profit nearly impossible.
Make it illegal to re-sell tickets to an event for higher than face value.
The BOTS on Wall Street are owned by people with considerably more money so they are safe from any legal consequence.
Lucky for us, the BOTS on Wall Street failed to get their own BOT into the White House a month ago...
So how about Ticketmaster, which got busted for owning shell corps that it had buy up all ticket for popular concerts instantly? Are they now going to stop that sh*t?
"bypass any computer security system designed to limit" What system does the NYSE employ to disallow bots? AFAIK, absolutely none.
Progress gets another meaning entirely when you stand at the edge of a high cliff. Some still make a step forward. That is tragic but if that were their will one has to accept it. Problem is - they sometimes take bystanders with them.
Because a bot buying stock doesn't prevent you from buying it as well?
The first problem is simply enforcement. First, the individuals must live in the US (commonly not the case) to prosecute. Secondly, one needs to specifically identify legal vs. illegal forms of ticket buying/scalping, which doesn't seem trivial (based on the article summary anyway).
If scalping is legal (in your local jurisdiction, etc..) then the sky's the limit. Having bots buy your tickets or you mashing your computer is the exact same stupid thing.
Here's one possible system to defeat scalpers: Have a lottery with CC numbers held ahead of time when enrolling. If you want to enrol in the lottery without a CC, you must physically walk to a ticket retailer and leave some other form of unique ID. Hold the lottery open for a few weeks then start randomly drawing winners eligible to 'win' the right to pay for the tickets. If all the tickets aren't sold in that period, they go into the classical sales model and get sold FIFO.
If the tickets were brought by means not intended or allowed from the distributor, have a clause that can cancel the ticket at any time if found in violation of purchasing regulations. The person buying the 'now counterfeit' tickets will get burned and they may end up not using grey market tickets again. To protect legal resale, have the venue/distributor put up a system to verify that the tickets are legit and transferable. Once a purchase has been 'blessed' for transfer, add the ticket number as a legitimate ticket for interested third parties to verify. A system like this also helps inform the populace that there's an easy way of telling a legitimate ticket from a bogus one. Maybe eliminate tickets all together and just have online accounts, with transfers managed in-site. Ticket sales fraud would essentially die.
But, you know nanny state and all that. Idiots deserve the right to get soaked/ripped off, etc.....
Bye!
Poe's law is so troublesome.
Sub-microsecond speeds do not help the real market.
bad idea...
the voltage is too low
>market liquidity
that's a false statement that has been repeated until people accept it as truth. they are doing nothing of the sort. the HF people are specifically looking for close buy/sell orders that haven't been received yet and are slipping in a quick buy/sell to make a profit. it's parasitic behavior.
If a company doesn't want to sell bots tickets let them figure out how to prevent bots from buying tickets. This is none of the governments business. Nobody is being hurt and at best this is a contractual violation and it should remain just that. What it does do is prevent tickets from venues that may not want to prohibit bots from purchasing tickets from doing so. It also deprives the public of a free market. This is an issue of monopolies and in most forms we fight it. But as soon as you start talking about copy"right" and similar that are used to enforce stuff like this it all of the sudden becomes OK. Sorry- no, it's not OK. Your artificial construct (copy"right") that you've used to monopolize a market is NOT morally OK.
If you would prefer to live in a free society where people are able to trade freely and not be dominated by tyrannical governments and corporations that get to dictate what you can and can't do despite that your actions hurt nobody else then check out the Free State Project (http://www.freestateproject.org/ or check out http://www.freekeene.com/ for liberty news in NH, mostly, and http://youtube.com/freekeene for lots of activists videos). It's a migration of liberty activists from across the country to New Hampshire for the purpose of pursing liberty and freedom in our life time. Nowhere do we have a truly free place to go about our lives independent of government domination. Well, we want to change that in New Hampshire.
We're 10% of the way to the goal of having 20,000 signers migrate here. We have had thousands of people move already and there is no place in New Hampshire left where you won't run into others who think like you. We have groups and events by and for liberty-lovers like yourself all over New Hampshire today. We have elected many liberty-leaning politicians and even been targeted repeatedly by opposing political ideologies, parties, law enforcement, and even the FBI. The most active are routinely attacked and accused of ridicules crimes. Everything from child porn to pot. Fortunately they're never violent crimes and often totally unfounded or otherwise harmless. They wouldn't be doing this if we weren't succeeding in our quest to create a truly free state.
Things libertarians object to:
The police state we live in. We don't need the police generally speaking if we eliminate taxes the majority of people would be able to afford to hire private security and/or utilize monitoring apps like Cell 411 (users can call for help from family, friends, and neighbours, and provide the type of assistance needed and location). Until 1930s New Hampshire didn't even have a state police. The need for police is over-rated.
Drivers licenses. We have a right in the constitution to free travel and yet we don't really have that right at all due to terrible supreme court rulings. When half or more of this country isn't serviced by decent public transportation the right to travel is meaningless. One should not only be entitled to travel, but they should be able to do so utilizing whatever the means of transportation of the day are. The roads have gotten much safer since the days of the constitution so there is no excuse to mandate drivers licenses and permission slips. Particularly when it is apparent that these things have not made us any safer. We still have drunk drivers on the road and similar. What it has done is punished EVERYBODY despite that the majority don't drink and drive.
We don't need license plates either or vehicular registration. The state has forced these things on us without our consent and on the sale that they'd make us safer from car thieves and similar. Well, you can arrest someone without a license plate and you can certainly put a license plate on your car without it being government mandated. And now you can even tag your car with GPS devices. There is no excuse to require such license plates today as one can easily protect oneself if one chooses to without government mandated plates. The government has also been abusing license plates to trac
Because a bot buying stock doesn't prevent you from buying it as well?
Sure it does -- in the same way.
Bots buying tickets buy them to sell them at a higher price. Bots buying stocks buy them to sell them at a higher price. If you're unable or unwilling to pay that price, then you can't buy the ticket/stock.
If it is sold online, software is buying it. The bot is just another layer between the eventual end user and the seller - one of many. Why not simply ban all reselling of tickets while forcing the original source to repurchase (and resell at original cost if they so desire) any tickets that go unused in exchange for this protection?
As I read this, if I pay a thousand Amazon Turk users a buck a piece to buy the tickets, I'm good again. Whether the layer is a robot or a hubot doesn't really matter in the end.
And how is my personal digital assistant going to buy my tickets for me in the near future with laws like this? Wouldn't this ban having Google, Cortana, or Siri buy your ticket?
Just how far do you think a signal can travel in a microsecond?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
There are plenty of ways to limit ticket sales to the actual consumer of the ticket. Airlines do it all the time. The fact that ticket agencies haven't bothered to take steps against scalpers and bots tells me they aren't really interested in solving the problem.
If the companies selling the tickets don't care, why should government?
Very simple. Congress gets more money from the NYSE... Good to see they have their priorities straight and acted so quickly. The concert ticket crisis has finally been resolved.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Exactly.
DC has to be a lot higher ... up around 40-50 volts.
We can go lower than that if we use AC ... down to about 25-30 volts.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Processing in bursts with time stamps is not 'going back in time'. All we want is to remove the speed of light arms race and level the playing field.
Good-bye
Its a good thing the new president doesnt have anyone in his cabinet from Wall Street or Goldman Sacks especially in a position like Treasury Secretary. .That would be kind of awkward.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/11/29/news/economy/donald-trump-steven-mnuchin-treasury/index.html
Why surprises me is why popular events haven't moved to an auction system for tickets -
U2 is coming to town, tickets on sale by auction - They bid up to what the market will bear and (presumably) sell at a slower pace...
saltwater whetted contact surface and a 12V DC car battery will do fine.
Ask me how I know... *ouch* (not the balls though)
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
About 300M.
give the people bread and circuses... right?
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Faster ways to screw people isn't exactly progress.
other than that it is done by broker bots instead of scalper bots?
Which is which?
I would guess you mean the high frequency traders are the scalpers, because there is no more text book example of scalping than something hearing about a buyer, then running ahead and buying all available products, and then selling them to the buyer at a premium. Where the bots buying tickets is just adjusting for incorrectly priced goods and increasing liquidity in the market by ensure the players willing to pay the most gets it.
Oh would you shove it with the "liberals" nonsense. Conservatives game the government as much or more, you're just biased against noticing it.
The truth is that humans will game any system we design.
The important question here is - why are artists not selling tickets at an auction to maximize revenue. If you answer this, then you will know how ticket sales for popular shows are different from stock markets.
This is an attempt by the government to defy the principle of supply and demand. It will fail because people will find a way. You have people complaining that tickets are too expensive and others complaining that tickets sell out too fast. You can't fix both problems in a free market.
I think we should look ahead to the day when anyone trying to game a stock market is taken outside, stripped naked, and their testicles are plugged into a car battery, but that's just me.
That would be everyone. The days of farmers buying futures to protect their crops are in the past.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Oh so I guess this means they've taken care of more pressing business, like say filling a Supreme Court vacancy?
I think we should look ahead to the day when anyone trying to game a stock market is taken outside, stripped naked, and their testicles are plugged into a car battery, but that's just me.
Where are the SJWs to correct this sexist diatribe?
No, the profit is their incentive. They move prices quickly to the new equilibrium. They keep the information within the system synced. You may think that they don't provide liquidity but that doesn't make it true.
People forget that there were days when people could NOT sell their shares because there was no buyer. There were days when Ford was $3 at Chicago and $3.10 at NYSE! There were days when prices moved at 1/8 a dollar. And the guy on the trading floor made 1/8 a dollar for EVERY trade. Now... it's 1/1000 a dollar. Put those floor guys out of business. Replaced by computers. Put more stock and shares up for trading. Put the stock market in the hands of the general public.
Because members of the government got burned by scalpers?
Seriously. People who think that Trump will be harder on Wall Street than Clinton would are seriously deluded.
The only "liquidity" that HFT "enhances" is in the bank account of the person controlling the software. It really is parasitic. It feeds off the system without adding anything to it. If I put in an order for a stock at $3 per share and some computer sitting between my broker and the exchange notices that the price is now $2.99 per share, and they buy the shares at $2.99 in order to sell to me at $3, that doesn't do anything except give money to the person who paid however much was required to have only a 3-meter cable between their computer and the trading computer. The people benefiting from the system have a wide range of words that they use to try to explain why it's actually a good thing that they're getting paid for not doing anything, but the reality is that the money belongs in the hands of the seller.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
While the method of attaching your delicate skin to the battery might be painful, the 12 volts of the battery might not actually result in any feeling whatsoever.
Bruce Perens.
With all due respect, I'd rather you kept that to yourself.
Bruce Perens.
Lucky for us, the BOTS on Wall Street failed to get their own BOT into the White House a month ago...
Right, yeah, the guy who lives in a gilded tower with his name on it in the middle of New York City is really going to stick it to all of those Wall Street people, isn't he? I mean, if there's one person who really understands the common people, it's a guy living in his own 200-meter tower who covers anything he can in gold.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So, how far would you go to "level the playing field?".
Perhaps trades are processed weekly? Maybe buy/sell orders would be processed Wednesday morning after everyone has had a chance to read their weekly paper copy of Barrons on Saturday, dig through the market section to see what happened since last Monday and ride their horse down to the Schwab branch office and placed their buy/sell orders?
However, even this wouldn't level the playing field for those who have to rely on market results being sent to them via USPS - maybe move to processing buy and sell orders on the 1st and 15th of the month (or the first business day thereafter)?
If you don't like the price of a Tesla, don't buy it. If you don't like the price of a stock, don't buy it. What do you care what someone else made or lost off the stock 1ms ago or 20 years ago?
Oh would you shove it with the "liberals" nonsense. Conservatives game the government as much or more, you're just biased against noticing it.
The truth is that humans will game any system we design.
EVERYONE with any sense in the US games the government, because the government has TOO DAMN MUCH POWER.
Have gnu, will travel.
"In the long long term, people will be so jaded with going to 'ticketed' shows that the attendances will drop below capacity."
Because they haven't lobbied Congress with cash... Yet.
Perhaps you should ask Santa.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
how does high fructose cornsyrup help?
If the bot goes overboard it will get stuck with an overpriced stock. That's always been the risk market makers take.
Front-running is illegal, bot or not. Without illegal front-running, bots just increase liquidity through competition with each other. Providing liquidity is the way that market makers make a profit - they buy when no one else is willing to, then later sell when no one else is willing to, and make a profit off the sporadic timing in thinner markets - but the result is a better price for "real" buyers and sellers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Fair game for Election propaganda spamming? Talk about a messed system.
Promoters and venue owners are professionals at selling tickets. Incompetence is not the cause for under-priced tickets. They intentionally set the ticket price below the market-clearing price to: 1) gain free promotion with shows that sell-out in minutes and 2) add an additional performances in the same city.
While it's possible that the initial demand was underestimated, promoters and venue owners largely know what they're doing.
Oh would you shove it with the "liberals" nonsense. Conservatives game the government as much or more, you're just biased against noticing it.
The truth is that humans will game any system we design.
Just in case you were not aware of your own bias, I put it in bold. Funny thing is you give the correct statement just beyond that..
What about the people who do not identify as positive testicular entities? BIGOT!
What about banning the ticket master fees!
A fee to use your own paper and ink or you can pay the same fee to have them mail it to you.
I claim discrimination! Also does anyone know how to solve captcha?
big events need a ticket lottery so it's more fair does not lead to a buy rush that can over load sites and you make it easier on people who can be on line at the sale open time. Some events can sell out fast and you need to make it fair and you do not have someone with 6 cable HSI accounts and lot of systems buying them all up. Yes some on DSLreports.com was talking about there setup like that.
Why? People accept this proposition as a matter of faith and I don't see anybody backing it up with concrete evidence.
You have to think of the repercussions of doing things like requiring ID at Will Call. Lines become long and eliminate the convenience of e-tickets. You wouldn't be able to buy your kids tickets to a show and let them go without you. There will always need to be some physical ticket that can be passed between people to get them in at the gate, and you can't make it inconvenient in this day and age. I LOVE the idea of clamping down on scalping and brokering, but the real problem is that the ticket is sold for way less than it's actually worth. The price of the ticket should be whatever people are willing to pay for it. If that means the team/venue/whatever charges $1500 per seat for a big game, so be it. The teams, promoters, venues, or whoever are the starting point for the ticket sales are the ones who need to put the work into predicting the actual value of their tickets before they put them out there, and then pricing them accordingly. Even if that starts to become what appears to be overpriced, it's no different than what the brokers are doing with them now, and that's a slimy business for sure.
Either way, you still bought the shares for $3, with or without an HFT middleman. The only difference is now it happens in milliseconds rather than in minutes.
Better to call it what it is: skimming.
The HFT algorithms only trade when it is profitable for for them to trade. So the liquidity argument dries right up when the algorithms shut down when the market conditions are no longer favorable. I know, because I implemented algorithmic trading software for a year. The algorithms are not altruistic, they are designed to make money. To provide real liquidity you need market makers/specialists, as that was their job. Now, it's just a bunch of computerized trading programs waiting for some wannabe day trader to try to make a profit, let alone some sucker trying to manage their own 401k.
It depends a great deal on the impedance of the current pathway. 12 volts into a short blood path might draw enough current to matter. Through a skin barrier, 12 volts is below the threshold. But into a catheter relatively low voltages can have a significant effect. Fibrillation 'doses' of current are in the microamperes.
He has different cronies than the harridan. His aren't necessarily Wall Street Speculators.
Not all rich people are alike.
Trump isn't 'essentially good' or anything ridiculous like that, but his entire wealth hasn't come from political maneuvering and cronyism like his election opponent's wealth. He plays a different game.
We shouldn't kid ourselves that it is in all ways 'better' but it's definitely not the exact plan of the Wall Street speculators. The harridan's plans were.
they buy when no one else is willing to, then later sell when no one else is willing to
Yeah, right. With a few hundred milliseconds of time between the buy and the sell.
How generous of them to make the sacrifice of taking that risk, to the benefit of us all. /s
Doing the exact same thing as everyone else but faster is considering "bypassing a security system"?
Well played Bruce. Well played.
(Sec. 2) This bill prohibits the circumvention of a security measure, access control system, or other technological measure on an Internet website or online service of a ticket issuer that is used to enforce posted event ticket purchasing limits or to maintain the integrity of posted online ticket purchasing order rules
This is a horrible bill! At least the DRM related law has a provision saying if something is trivial crackable then breaking it isn't illegal. They just made changing your browser ID from Firefox to IE illegal if the site says users must use IE to purchase tickets.
It shall not be unlawful, however, to create or use software or systems to: (1) investigate, or further the enforcement or defense of, alleged violations;
Hey, lets give big companies and law enforcement a free pass to legally hack into your computer or search your bag ("systems" isn't limited to software) just to make sure at some random point in time you didn't buy a bunch of tickets automatically. Well, "automatically" is the wrong word. An access control system and technological measure includes the "not letting you buy a ticket until you agree to the ToC" feature, so if you do anything against the ToC then you lied about the checkbox. Lying would be circumvention, so really this turns into one of those laws everyone breaks accidentally and will be exploited against people the hosting company doesn't like and they are legally allowed to do whatever to you and your stuff without a warrant or arrest. Bought 2 tickets by logging in under a different user name? Too bad, you're a criminal now. Like most laws, its title is misleading. Bots have nothing to do with this law.
or (2) identify and analyze flaws and vulnerabilities of security measures to advance the state of knowledge in the field of computer system security or to assist in the development of computer security products.
The only good part of the bill. But they left out assistance technology, so if you need software to help you use their site, too bad criminal.
The bill also prohibits the sale of or offers to sell an event ticket in interstate commerce obtained through such a circumvention violation if the seller participated in, had the ability to control, or should have known about the violation.
Double the crime.
for a public event with an attendance capacity exceeding 200 persons.
So for important, big shows only. All those minor nobodies can still have all their tickets scalped. Who cares about them? All our big shows that bring in a ton of money must have protection from a few bad sales but the little guys where 5 missing seats actually matters and is noticeable must fight for themselves.
I might as well quote the rest of the bill:
Violations shall be treated as unfair or deceptive acts or practices under the Federal Trade Commission Act.
The bill provides authority to the Federal Trade Commission and states to enforce against such violations.
This is a bad law. I'm surprised so much of Slashdot can no longer think logically about these things as most of the other posts are about how great this is or suggestions on how we could further erode privacy in order to improve corporate control and profits. Where did all the "I bought it so I can do whatever the fuck I want with it" people go? Intent of a law doesn't matter. The text matters. The text of this laws sucks and is clearly written in favor of big businesses. What justification is there for excluding the smaller events? That part makes no sense. This law doesn't incur any costs on a business of any size.
There's that big government problem again.
I get the impression that most of the "big government" growth has been initiated by big corporations and business interests. I suppose their lobbyists have to do something to justify their salaries.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
It can sometimes work that way, but there's no guarantee. If the buyer meets the sellers price, there's no one in between - the deal is done. But the moment that happens, the market is back to normal, with a gap between buyer and seller.
If the highest current outstanding bid (WTB) is $100, and the highest current outstanding ask (WTS) is $104, how's the bot going to make money - buy at 104 and sell at 100? No. The bot makes money when someone wants to sell "at market" the bot buys at 101, and the seller makes $1 more. Later, if the price hasn't moved, and someone is buying "at market", the bot may sell at 103, and the buyer saves $1.
Do you understand how this works? And why it's risky? If there's only 1 bot, it is reasonably safe, but it benefits both buyer and seller, so why complain. But there's usually more than one bot racing each other, so it's more like buy at 101.95 and sell at 102.05, which is great for the casual, small-time guy like me. I remember how it was last century, and it sucked.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That was my thought, they could sell half at auction and sets of cheap tickets could go into a raffle for people who want a chance at cheap tickets. Also, I fail to see how ticket-master can't spot individuals buying large quantities of tickets, surely it should be obvious when 1 buyer tries to buy dozens of tickets that they are for resale. I don't think they care.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
So what was it that forced people to make unprofitable trades before HFT?
DC straight to the bloodstream - one volt can easily kill you. One volt / the resistance of blood gives you a current stronger than the nervous system - and it's a solid current- passing straight through the heart. Where it overwhelms the autonomic nervous system and basically causes the heart to cease up. My dad wrote his dissertation on the topic.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In theory - prices reflect the value of companies and price shifts reflect altered perceptions of which companies are producing the most value.
There is no fucking way that the value a company produces can change in microsecond timeframes. There is no way that the price shfit can reflect an actual change in the state of the market- the perception therefore is entirely divorced from reality.
This REDUCES the efficacy of the market's price mechanism by INCREASES the difference between perceived and actual value of companies.
HFT does not increase market liquidity, it does not help shift resources to where they are most valuable - it actively counteracts and undermines those very processes !
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
He's got TWO ex goldman sachs employees in his cabinet - INCLUDING the treasury secretary.
At least Clinton had been forced to make promises to the progressive wing of the democratic party to get the Sanders supporters on-board, which would have precluded her being that bad.
It doesn't MATTER whether you believe she would WANT to be. She wouldn't be ABLE to - because she had been forced to make promises against that, which she would have to keep if she wanted another term.
Trump on the other hand is sucking the wall street dong like no other president before ever has ! Hell his taxplan will give wallstreet moguls 6 trillion dollars - which you will have to make up with YOUR taxes.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
What is it with major US legislation that they feel the need to create some acronym by giving the new bill some terrible convoluted name. I remember doing that sort of thin in Junior school.
Actually, I think the system should be set up so that when people all act in their best interests, you get the desired outcome.
The real trick is determining the desired outcome. People have a lot of trouble expressing exactly what the stock market is, or what they want it to be. This actually applies to most things in our world; people are always talking about "improving education", but good luck getting a measurable set of goals from most people using that phrase.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Boats. Gotta involve boats... :)
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
No, you do it with a reverse auction.
Offer the tickets at an extremely high price initially, and then lower the price with sales feedback until you get closer to the market clearing price.
The thing is, brokers know that the market clearing price is higher than the face value.
If you offered all the seats at $5000 per ticket when they went on sale, brokers wouldn't be able to snap them up on the first day of sale. There's no markup for them.
As you lower the price, you will find people who are willing to pay high prices for in-demand seats but they would still be at prices brokers would be unable to make money on. Some people would be unwilling to buy them at those prices and would wait until the prices reached a level that matched what they were willing to pay. Most of the time this is going to be close to the prices you probably would pay to a broker, but it's going to be above the prices where brokers will be able to arbitrage them.
People will whine that this will make tickets more expensive, which is true -- more expensive than current face value. But it's extremely difficult now to get tickets at face value because the tickets are priced too low, brokers buy them.
No, that's what HFTs TRY to do. And if only ONE entity had control of the bots, you would be absolutely correct. But in the real world, there a hundreds of such powerful entities running thousands of such bots trying to get a part of that pie. And they all, total profit wise, make 1/100000 of a penny per trade when you consider the losses and running costs of that bot. Do they make profits, yes, but not as much as you folks think. Almost NO ONE reports the costs of these bots, they just speculate how much the TOTAL pie size is that the unknown number but massive DOS like frenzy of a feast had eaten up. The whole picture isn't as rosy.
That pie of profit all these posters against HFTs rally against, will never go to the general trader. Historically that went to FAR fewer individuals (100) that paid for a seat and sat at the NYSE/London/Chicago. This pie is now chopped into so many little pieces that the HFTs barely are worth it. HFTs die and new ones are born everyday.
Ideally for the market movers, hedge funds, and rich people, there would NO HFTs. Or there would be a monopoly one on each stock. But the reality is there are thousands upon thousands that fight against each other. The human users aren't even considered in their battles, but in the end are actually better off because without HFTs, it was other and fewer humans that had keys and were the ones taking advantage.
Why on earth would they want to do that? They have zero incentive whether scalpers buy 100% of the tickets or normal fans do. They get their fee either way and fan outrage has no effect on them since the tickets are still being sold. They even have an incentive to sell to the scalpers to turn around and sell the tickets on their resale marketplace double dipping on tickets for increased profits.
That's why the HFTs try to be less than a football field away from the exchange.
Here's the real problem with HFT's.
There is too much money in the stock market, due to America's (GOP) insistence that we just dump everything in there and call in privatized, the long term low interest rates, and the general dominance of Finance in our economy.
Cheap storage VM.
The act of buying tickets for scalpers will be handled by offshore boiler rooms (using either bots or dirt-cheap humans), and "gifted" to the scalpers. Lotsa luck trying to track down straw purchases from Bangalore.
Hell his taxplan will give wallstreet moguls 6 trillion dollars - which you will have to make up with YOUR taxes.
Well, he could always just Bankrupt the government. That would insure his lasting legacy and be inline with his past "success". Take the money out of the company (gov) and leave so much debt that there's nothing left worth salvaging.
We can call this the Hostess method of governing.
Cheap storage VM.
I remember how it was last century, and it sucked.
Vampire?
Cheap storage VM.
All of these comments seem to be focused solely on the price aspect. While having bots snatch up all of the tickets and resell them at a higher price, the one thing that makes me on the fence about it is consumer choice. When I go to a ticket reseller website there is a list of available tickets, sortable by price and seat location. I am happy to pay a little more and get to choose where I want to sit. YMMV.
captcha: archfool (maybe it's true, hard to tell sometimes...)
Oh, dear, let's go to this now.
Computer buying of performance tickets enhances liquidity in that market. Instant sales, the venue and exhibitor are guaranteed sales, the artist(s) are ensured of their fee, all is well. The market then is extended as buyers pile in and buy at markup, and only the original seller(s) suffer in not sharing in the markup.
Or do they? Perhaps there is a raging business in brokered resales, and the venue/exhibitor/performers are the ones most cheated, if none of them share in the markup?
HFT is pure arbitrage. Liquidity isn't the primary feature. Automated ticket purchasing is even worse, in that the systems purport to open sales to buyers at a point in time, but the truth is very few human buyers are *permitted* to purchase - the bots win.
This is a good thing, enhanced only if the law could permit bot sales when disclosed in advance by the original sellers, putting you and me on notice that we are wasting our time queuing up to click and fail. At least be honest, so I won't bother, but will know that those tickets to the concert I want to go to won't cost $65, they will cost $125. Each. No matter.
Than I can make choices in an informed manner. And know that I'm actually enriching the scalpers. Then i can choose.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The stock market IS a game.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Conservatives have been out of power and influence for so ling, this is stupid. But you're excused,since most assume Republicans are Conservatives.
They are mostly not. And to stomp out the flames in advance, neither is Trump. But he's not part of the Establishment, so we can hope for some minimal changes.
If we had elected any Establishment candidate, we would have no reason to hope.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Many tickets are already limited to X per person or household, but from what I understand, hot tickets will have tons of bots swarming them.
Have you even glanced at Trumps various picks to run agencies? It reads like a "who's who" of corporate/business shills. I don't know if he's gotten to any finance/trade related agencies yet but given his choices thus far they'll most likely be the owners (or their lobbyists) of whoevers "BOTS" have the most money.
Stop the scalpers cold when all their attempts are covered as "circumvention".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Bring in the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA and smack scalpers silly.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Just *bleep* scalpers dead and make the cost of it too high to continue.
The ticket's worth is its face value, no ifs and buts.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Better to go all Singapore on the scalpers.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I am a libertarian.
While you are correct, some conservatives game the system with government. And you are correct, everyone will game the system. Draw a line, and everyone dances all around that line. The line is arbitrary and means nothing, but we pretend it is some sort of sacred place.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As I read this, if I pay a thousand Amazon Turk users a buck a piece to buy the tickets, I'm good again. Whether the layer is a robot or a hubot doesn't really matter in the end.
Then you get the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA and it won't matter how. The fact that you were circumventing the law was enough.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Make it a royal PITA to be one of those middlemen.
Face value is the worth of the ticket, anything else just outs a libertarian.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Better to punish scalpers than to enable them.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They only exist for lack of sufficient punishment.
Make it a huge enough pain to be one, and things will sort out for the better.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Scalpers are a problem and things like this help solve it.
Add the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision and scalpers are going to have a lot of bad days ahead.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
That's the stupidest thing I ev-
You will be intensely happy to learn that this statement has been proven mathematically incorrect.
:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Game theory has proven that we can design systems that are un-gameable (Acting honestly is the best strategy). It's called the "Revelation principle" I find it exciting
No, the only difference is that some parasite in the middle got paid for not doing anything, when the person selling the shares should have gotten all of that money.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
1. Because concert tickets have a maturity date where stocks do not (arguably would not apply to arbitrage of options).
2. Ticket vendors are granted a legal monopoly, and resellers are circumventing it.
He has different cronies than the harridan. His aren't necessarily Wall Street Speculators.
It's early December. Maybe we should wait until his cabinet nominees are actually confirmed and in their jobs before talking about what kind of cronies he will or will not have working for him.
So far his pick for the Treasury (Mnuchin) is a Goldman Sachs partner and member of the management committee, like his father before him. After he earned a few tens of millions at GS, he left and started his own hedge fund. Then he and George Soros and another hedge fund manager bought a home loan bank out of bankruptcy, and Mnuchin became the chair of that. That bank was involved in several lawsuits over questionable foreclosures before they sold it for over twice as much as they bought it for. $1.8 billion for 6 years work isn't bad, even if their bank was responsible for 39% of all federally insured reverse mortgages during that time (even though they only serviced 17% of the market). They did get subpoenas from HUD though, but I guess that problem's going to go away, haha, right? I suppose he'll need to move out of his $26 million house in Bel Air, but I'm sure someone will keep it warm until he gets back.
His pick for Commerce (Ross) is a billionaire who spent 24 years working for Rothschild Inc where he advised clients about bankruptcy restructuring, including being the senior managing director. He's the guy who allowed Trump to keep his Atlantic City casinos and rebuild his business after one of his bankruptcies. He left Rothschild and formed his own company with $440 million to buy up failing companies and try to resell them, including steel and coal companies. Back in 2006 when the Sago mine exploded and killed 12 people, he was involved with the company who owned that, knew about the safety problems, and refused to shut down the mine. So maybe they really will bring back the coal industry, even if it kills people. He's also a former officer of the NY state Democratic Party and served under Clinton. Oh, and, as of 2012, he was the "Grand Swipe" (or leader) of the "secret Wall Street fraternity" Kappa Beta Phi.
His pick for Transport, Elaine Chao, is not only the wife of the owner of the single most-punchable face in the Senate, but she was also a VP at Bank of America and an international banker at Citicorp. She was also the secretary of Labor when the Sago mine blew up, so she can reminisce about that with Ross. After the Bush administration she served on several boards, including Wells Fargo and News Corp.
Oh, and when he's not busy running the entire country, Trump is going to continue to produce his reality show. I wonder if it's going to say "Executive Producer: President Donald J. Trump" or if he'll go a little more low-key. I don't think low-key is in his vocabulary though.
Also, kudos on "harridan", I had to look that one up. Nothing like going back to the 1600s for your insulting words for women.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
The exact same thing happens when you're selling as well.
If you sell a share at $2.99, and then somebody buys at $2.99, then guess what? You still sold it at the price you asked for.
Likewise, if you place a bid for a share at $3 and then you buy at $3, then guess what? You still bought it for the price you asked for.
By the way, that quote in your signature is not only horribly misquoted, but it's horribly written English as well. Ben Franklin wouldn't have written such bad English, ("they who can"? Seriously?) and it was actually written like this:
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
And it likely doesn't mean what you think it means:
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/...
Oh, man, i'd love to see Yellen being put to shame!
The exact same thing happens when you're selling as well.
I know, when I'm selling then some parasite takes my money too.
If someone sends me a buy order at $3, but I lowered the price to $2.99 only a second before that buy order was sent, why does it make sense for a parasite to intercept that buy order and buy my shares to sell to the buyer? Why shouldn't it be me that gets the buy order that the buyer sent? Why does a parasite get the extra money instead of the seller?
There's even a car analogy. If I'm selling a car on Craigslist or something for $20k, and I'm not getting a lot of offers so I decide to lower the price to $19k, but just as I'm doing that someone is about to pick up the phone and call me with an offer to buy at $20k, is it really fair if someone intercepts that phone call and figures out that I just lowered the price, so they agree to the buyer's offer at $20k while also calling me and buying my car for $19k, so they get that extra thousand instead of me? Is that really a necessary function of society? Is that person really doing anything of value to anyone other than himself? It's that parasitic behavior, isn't that person just feeding off a system where they are not contributing anything in return?
If you sell a share at $2.99, and then somebody buys at $2.99, then guess what? You still sold it at the price you asked for.
Right, but someone was offering to buy it at a higher price, but instead of me getting that higher price it's a parasite who does literally no work except "facilitating the transaction" or "enhancing liquidity" or whatever other bullshit terms they want to use to describe getting paid for having a computer close to the trading computer.
Likewise, if you place a bid for a share at $3 and then you buy at $3, then guess what? You still bought it for the price you asked for.
Right, but some parasite got paid for not doing anything. I call the seller on the phone and say "hey, thanks for selling me those shares at $3." And he says "no, I sold them for $2.99." That seller should have gotten all the money, but he got cheated out of it because someone paid several million dollars for a 3 meter fiberoptic cable so that they can cheat people out of money many, many times per second.
This is something that finance people love to do: make money for themselves just by moving other peoples' money around. It's also referred to as "skimming" in the cases where it's illegal. I'll leave it up to the reader to figure out why it's not illegal when very rich people do it.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black