People all over the internet are so fond of
pointing out that you would be uninformed if you
only watch MSM. I've gotten so tired of this; because
I wonder how many people still exist that are MSM-only
viewers.
I'm not saying that there's *nobody* who just
watches NBC Nightly News and considers themselves informed.
It just seems that it's rapidly diminishing number of people.
I don't have statistics to back it up though. I suppose
ratings would be a good place to start; but you need some kind
of rating that's not just a "TV rating", which is obviously
out of date for such a study.
At any rate, the very fact that so many people no longer consider
primetime news a serious source, kindof makes the "MSM-only viewer" a
bit of a strawman.
If they have skills that are in short supply, then
yes. If all they know is how to print out "Hello World"
in Java, then "no".
OTOH, 60 year old developer who can troubleshoot
the COBOL that glues your organization together should
probably make more than any random 22 year-old.
In other words, age shouldn't matter. An honest eval
of what the worker can bring should
Yeah. An honest eval. Yesterday in the USA we celebrated
MLK day, and part of "the dream" was honest evaluation, right?
Clear Channel, American Idol, and the RIAA beat you to it.
Rumor has it, ragtag bands of musicians are holed up in various clubs
and the occasional college station, and make occasional forrays into enemy
territory. If you want to join the resistance, I wish you the best of luck.
Google was my choice because of its simplicity.
They're systematicly destroying what made me favor them
in the first place. They Bing-ified their image search
just recently, and it sucks. It crashes IE if you load
a 2nd page of results. Maybe they're trying to foist
their own version of lockin on us.
Google needs to get back to its roots, or somebody
will come along with something better. The real Google
killer might even be FaceBook-based search, where real
human beings in your network (or extended network) vet
the results.
It seems like that, managed properly, has the potential
to totally crush any algorithm when it comes to relevance.
If only there were some way to do it without FaceBook...
Posession of an ounce or less is now an infraction (like a parking ticket)
and $100 fine. No jail time, no trial unless you really want to fight it
which would probably be a waste of time. I assume you just mail the ticket
in with a check.
That's $100 anytime a cop sees somebody with a small ammount of pot, and
decides he needs to help the state.
Note, I don't see that as ideal. It certainly does nothing to take profits
away from gangs who posess much larger ammounts. It's a start though. BTW, this
was signed by outgoing governor Schwarzenegger, shortly before his term ended.
AFAIK, prior to that it was a misdemeanor with a larger fine and court time.
The court time was probably costing the state money.
If you really care about smoking pot, you're already a prop 215 holder (doc, I've got
this headache...) anyway.
I don't know if they have a path to profitability; but cutting
unnecessary staff can't hurt.
When I hit their page, I saw a number of ads were blocked, so
that answers the revenue question. Individual pages also seem
to have a link-bar at the top, which appears to link to promoted
content. Eminem is listed as their "top artist". Really??? Even
that seems dated.
As to whether or not they datamine their userbase and sell that info... I don't know.
It was the 60s. You couldn't just download stuff.
You paid real money for paper boobies, and you took what
you could get.
That aside, this chick has a fat face and appears to
be wearing a wig. Natural beauties with better features
and hair that looks real were plentiful back then I'm sure.
Maybe Hef could explain how she got
to be in the magazine (wink).
Is anybody working to prove that they aren't the same thing,
or is everybody in the field just brainwashed into believing that the Universe
has to be simple?
Social Networking is dead, Long Live Social Networking.
I have participated in a number of topic-specific web-based "social networks"
over the years. The topic-focused web sites are able to tailor themselves
to those who are interested in specific topics. There's a brisk competition
in those sites. Off-topic discussion is almost always tolerated in some form,
as long as it's done within guidelines.
Slashdot is actually an example of this.
We were all doing "social networking" before it was even called that.
Maybe "General-purpose one-size fits all" social networking is dead.
Special purpose social networking is alive and well, and I suspect it will
continue.
1. Use existing survey data to find spots on the moon where peaks are likely to contain good, solid rock.
2. Launch laser into LEO.
3. Carve monolith using precision control of the laser.
4. ???
5. Profit!
I don't think we can do this now. We'd probably learn a lot building the control systems to target and move the laser. Some of the results of that research might really be profitable.
Yep. In the case of onion futures, they probably could
have just made some rules to prevent corners instead of killing
the whole market. AFAIK, modern futures markets have rules designed
to prevent corners. The Wiki article also said the son of one of the
farmers hurt by the onion fiasco would actually like to see the futures
market come back. Apparently, he ran into a situation where being
able to hedge his crop (as other producers are able) would have been handy.
You just reminded me of one of my favorite stories--the story
of why onion futures were made illegal, and AFAIK they still are.
Markets are great; but they don't always work.
America, particularly the western states, were much more inclined
to gamble back in the 'ol days. Gold mining claims, striking out into
the territories to reap a harvest or get reaped.
When guys weren't gambling their lives in mines or on horseback,
they were gambling around a card table (OK, maybe not as much as the
movies depicted, but the West was full of risk).
Shit. The whole country was a gamble. If anything, I'd say the
introduction of high-stakes financial poker into our living rooms
represents a return to Amercian values; but that's just
one man's opinion.
What about stocks that pay dividends; you're supposed to hold on to them long-term, so does a narrow spread benefit those stocks at all?
You could just own the stock on the ex-dividend date, sell the next day, and still
get the dividend. I've never tried it. In theory the market should know about this and move
the stock so as to make it a pointless strategy. I'm sure that doesn't stop people
from trying.
Anyway, I'd tend to say that for people buying and holding dividend-paying
stocks for the long term, the impacts of HFT don't matter one way or the other.
Bid-ask spread is readily quantified, and readily available. Any
inequity due to HFT might be harder to quantify.
In highly liquid, HFT dominated markets, it's possible for the price
to be unfairly set. The big problem? How do we know what a fair price
is?
There are a lot of standard numbers you use to evaluate stocks: P/E, etc.
At the end of the day though, it always boils down to market price.
The idea that the old bid-ask spread is "hiding" in the new market
is possible; but how do you quantify it? Where would it go? I'm purely
speculating here (no pun intended) but perhaps it went to volatility. It would
be interesting to go back and look at real data from HFT vs. non-HFT markets,
and see if there is more volatility in them.
Note, volatility doesn't hurt small investors unless they get stopped
out. Stop-loss is a double-edged sword, and options have problems of their
own. To reiterate, I didn't say HFT was perfect; I just don't think it's
the demon that some make it out to be. A buy-and-hold investor isn't
affected by volatility in the short run at all--certainly not the kind
that HFTs might cause. An HFT can only drive the price of International Buggie Whip
to a PE of 1000 for so long before they get burned.
Or, more simply, are market-makers "taxing" trades more now or less?
Certainly there is more trading VOLUME now; but is the percentage going to
HFTs greater or less than the percentage going to brokers/specialists under
the old system?
If HFTs are making $1 billion on a trillion trades, while brokers/specialists
made $500 million on 200 billion trades, which is more fair?
Plainly, further study by guys whith degrees different than mine (and actual
jobs doing the studies) is needed...
Perhaps you could provide more details so I can understand what exactly you mean by "bid-ask spread", and how exactly HFT lowers it by holding onto stocks for a few hundred milliseconds.
OK, let's say there's a hypothetical security X.
X BID 45 @$0.50 ASK 10 @$0.70
If you want to buy security X, you could try bumping
up the bid to $0.55 and see if anybody will temporarily
lower their ask that far.
The market for security X has terrible liquidity.
Now let's say somebody looks at this, and sees the awful
liquidity. They say, hey, the market-makers suck. Let's
do something better. They start "scalping" security X.
They place bids at $0.55, then immediately flip for $0.65.
Now the market for security X has better liquidity.
Somebody interested in X might be more inclined to buy,
knowing that it doesn't have to rise too far before they
can reasonably cover the spread.
The market-maker just bested the previous market maker.
Market-maker A is shut out.... unless he can narrow the spread
even further.
Now, the market-maker doesn't actually want to speculate
in X if he can avoid it. It's in their interest to hold
for as short a time as possible, and to make all their money
off scalping or "skimming" as you call it. Without some kind
of market-maker, the spreads are wider. You can hate the market-maker
if you like; but try finding a better way to narrow spreads? I haven't
heard of it.
That's how it works, in a nutshell. I'm glossing over a lot
of detail, such as rebates and the different ETNs, and a lot
of other stuff.
Note, I'm not belonging to an HFT religion. I'm just seeing
it as "the worst system except for all the others". I don't believe
in just turning these guys loose without regulation or oversight.
You asked for an explanation of how this stuff works, and I've
given you my best understanding of it. I don't hold myself out as an expert. I'm just
somebody who has been trading a bit, and watching markets since my
teens...
If you can find a way to reduce bid-ask spreads without
this kind of stuff, then I'll agree. Until then, I can't
join the chorus of detractors.
With liquidity in the market, anyone who buys stock gets
a narrow spread. Take liquidity out of the market, and you send
us back to the dark days when stocks would trade at $1/8th spreads
if you were lucky. $1/4 was common. Not only did you pay higher
commissions, you paid the spread.
Unless you're pining for the days when you called
your broker, paid him a percentage of the trade, and
he placed your order in a market with a huge spread then
you should be thanking the liquidity providers, not bashing them.
The current system doesn't hurt the little guy. The old system
made it so the little guy wouldn't even think about it. I know, because
I came of age when the old system was still in place for a few years.
Buying in with a $1/4 spread on something trading for $10-$20, and then waiting
for a significant percentage gain just to cover the spread??? No thank-you.
HFTs? I LOVE them.
OK, so it's not just me. I was thinking TLDR has a new meaning: Too LINKY Didn't Read.
In order to get to the stories, you had to parse all these busy paragraphs and click a link if you were interested.
The title implied it was something like a top-10 list; but it wasn't organized as a list at all.
They should re-do it as a list of links, with just a very brief summary... but really they should just trash the whole thing. It looks like they just found a bunch of tech horror stories, wrote some paragraphs and scattered links in them. Maybe they spent five minutes on this after dumping out the bong water.
My thought too. A lot of places have (and many more had) electric "buses"
except they were on tracks with overhead wires. Having
a trolley with rubber wheels, and a battery for short-gaps where you haven't
built out the overhead wires (or don't want them for aesthetic reasons) makes
sense. I heard about a bus like that somewhere in Europe that used flywheel
energy storage to traverse a roughly 2km gap between overhead wires. Sorry
I don't recall the details on that; but IIRC it was being done more than 20 years ago.
Because it's a commodity. As long as the cost of production is less than
the market price, you will buy from them. The labor and environmental regulations
will affect their profit margin. As the purchaser of a commodity, you don't care
about that.
This is true for any fungible commodity. When you buy gold, you don't care if
it cost $500/oz or $1000/oz for a particular miner to extract. You only care that it costs $1400/oz.
Slashdot Mirror
People all over the internet are so fond of pointing out that you would be uninformed if you only watch MSM. I've gotten so tired of this; because I wonder how many people still exist that are MSM-only viewers.
I'm not saying that there's *nobody* who just watches NBC Nightly News and considers themselves informed. It just seems that it's rapidly diminishing number of people. I don't have statistics to back it up though. I suppose ratings would be a good place to start; but you need some kind of rating that's not just a "TV rating", which is obviously out of date for such a study.
At any rate, the very fact that so many people no longer consider primetime news a serious source, kindof makes the "MSM-only viewer" a bit of a strawman.
If they have skills that are in short supply, then yes. If all they know is how to print out "Hello World" in Java, then "no".
OTOH, 60 year old developer who can troubleshoot the COBOL that glues your organization together should probably make more than any random 22 year-old.
In other words, age shouldn't matter. An honest eval of what the worker can bring should
Yeah. An honest eval. Yesterday in the USA we celebrated MLK day, and part of "the dream" was honest evaluation, right?
Clear Channel, American Idol, and the RIAA beat you to it.
Rumor has it, ragtag bands of musicians are holed up in various clubs and the occasional college station, and make occasional forrays into enemy territory. If you want to join the resistance, I wish you the best of luck.
So, you call down to the manager to complain about the bedbugs. The manager says, "They're not bugs, they're features".
Google was my choice because of its simplicity. They're systematicly destroying what made me favor them in the first place. They Bing-ified their image search just recently, and it sucks. It crashes IE if you load a 2nd page of results. Maybe they're trying to foist their own version of lockin on us.
Google needs to get back to its roots, or somebody will come along with something better. The real Google killer might even be FaceBook-based search, where real human beings in your network (or extended network) vet the results.
It seems like that, managed properly, has the potential to totally crush any algorithm when it comes to relevance. If only there were some way to do it without FaceBook...
Posession of an ounce or less is now an infraction (like a parking ticket) and $100 fine. No jail time, no trial unless you really want to fight it which would probably be a waste of time. I assume you just mail the ticket in with a check.
That's $100 anytime a cop sees somebody with a small ammount of pot, and decides he needs to help the state.
Note, I don't see that as ideal. It certainly does nothing to take profits away from gangs who posess much larger ammounts. It's a start though. BTW, this was signed by outgoing governor Schwarzenegger, shortly before his term ended. AFAIK, prior to that it was a misdemeanor with a larger fine and court time. The court time was probably costing the state money.
If you really care about smoking pot, you're already a prop 215 holder (doc, I've got this headache...) anyway.
Whoah! If you're the real Kaz, long time no C. :)
I don't know if they have a path to profitability; but cutting unnecessary staff can't hurt.
When I hit their page, I saw a number of ads were blocked, so that answers the revenue question. Individual pages also seem to have a link-bar at the top, which appears to link to promoted content. Eminem is listed as their "top artist". Really??? Even that seems dated.
As to whether or not they datamine their userbase and sell that info... I don't know.
It was the 60s. You couldn't just download stuff. You paid real money for paper boobies, and you took what you could get.
That aside, this chick has a fat face and appears to be wearing a wig. Natural beauties with better features and hair that looks real were plentiful back then I'm sure. Maybe Hef could explain how she got to be in the magazine (wink).
Is anybody working to prove that they aren't the same thing, or is everybody in the field just brainwashed into believing that the Universe has to be simple?
Social Networking is dead, Long Live Social Networking.
I have participated in a number of topic-specific web-based "social networks" over the years. The topic-focused web sites are able to tailor themselves to those who are interested in specific topics. There's a brisk competition in those sites. Off-topic discussion is almost always tolerated in some form, as long as it's done within guidelines.
Slashdot is actually an example of this.
We were all doing "social networking" before it was even called that.
Maybe "General-purpose one-size fits all" social networking is dead. Special purpose social networking is alive and well, and I suspect it will continue.
1. Use existing survey data to find spots on the moon where peaks are likely to contain good, solid rock.
2. Launch laser into LEO.
3. Carve monolith using precision control of the laser.
4. ???
5. Profit!
I don't think we can do this now. We'd probably learn a lot building the control systems to target and move the laser. Some of the results of that research might really be profitable.
Yep. In the case of onion futures, they probably could have just made some rules to prevent corners instead of killing the whole market. AFAIK, modern futures markets have rules designed to prevent corners. The Wiki article also said the son of one of the farmers hurt by the onion fiasco would actually like to see the futures market come back. Apparently, he ran into a situation where being able to hedge his crop (as other producers are able) would have been handy.
Yay for pork bellies! :)
You just reminded me of one of my favorite stories--the story of why onion futures were made illegal, and AFAIK they still are. Markets are great; but they don't always work.
America, particularly the western states, were much more inclined to gamble back in the 'ol days. Gold mining claims, striking out into the territories to reap a harvest or get reaped.
When guys weren't gambling their lives in mines or on horseback, they were gambling around a card table (OK, maybe not as much as the movies depicted, but the West was full of risk).
Shit. The whole country was a gamble. If anything, I'd say the introduction of high-stakes financial poker into our living rooms represents a return to Amercian values; but that's just one man's opinion.
I park at the far end and walk a bit further. I don't waste time chasing spaces, and I get a little exercise. I don't pay for a gym membership either.
If you want to employ multibillion dollar tech to solve this "huge problem", be my guest. Sheesh!
What about stocks that pay dividends; you're supposed to hold on to them long-term, so does a narrow spread benefit those stocks at all?
You could just own the stock on the ex-dividend date, sell the next day, and still get the dividend. I've never tried it. In theory the market should know about this and move the stock so as to make it a pointless strategy. I'm sure that doesn't stop people from trying.
Anyway, I'd tend to say that for people buying and holding dividend-paying stocks for the long term, the impacts of HFT don't matter one way or the other.
That's a compelling argument.
Bid-ask spread is readily quantified, and readily available. Any inequity due to HFT might be harder to quantify.
In highly liquid, HFT dominated markets, it's possible for the price to be unfairly set. The big problem? How do we know what a fair price is?
There are a lot of standard numbers you use to evaluate stocks: P/E, etc. At the end of the day though, it always boils down to market price.
The idea that the old bid-ask spread is "hiding" in the new market is possible; but how do you quantify it? Where would it go? I'm purely speculating here (no pun intended) but perhaps it went to volatility. It would be interesting to go back and look at real data from HFT vs. non-HFT markets, and see if there is more volatility in them.
Note, volatility doesn't hurt small investors unless they get stopped out. Stop-loss is a double-edged sword, and options have problems of their own. To reiterate, I didn't say HFT was perfect; I just don't think it's the demon that some make it out to be. A buy-and-hold investor isn't affected by volatility in the short run at all--certainly not the kind that HFTs might cause. An HFT can only drive the price of International Buggie Whip to a PE of 1000 for so long before they get burned.
Or, more simply, are market-makers "taxing" trades more now or less? Certainly there is more trading VOLUME now; but is the percentage going to HFTs greater or less than the percentage going to brokers/specialists under the old system?
If HFTs are making $1 billion on a trillion trades, while brokers/specialists made $500 million on 200 billion trades, which is more fair?
Plainly, further study by guys whith degrees different than mine (and actual jobs doing the studies) is needed...
Perhaps you could provide more details so I can understand what exactly you mean by "bid-ask spread", and how exactly HFT lowers it by holding onto stocks for a few hundred milliseconds.
OK, let's say there's a hypothetical security X.
X BID 45 @$0.50 ASK 10 @$0.70
If you want to buy security X, you could try bumping up the bid to $0.55 and see if anybody will temporarily lower their ask that far.
The market for security X has terrible liquidity.
Now let's say somebody looks at this, and sees the awful liquidity. They say, hey, the market-makers suck. Let's do something better. They start "scalping" security X. They place bids at $0.55, then immediately flip for $0.65.
Now the market for security X has better liquidity. Somebody interested in X might be more inclined to buy, knowing that it doesn't have to rise too far before they can reasonably cover the spread.
The market-maker just bested the previous market maker. Market-maker A is shut out.... unless he can narrow the spread even further.
Now, the market-maker doesn't actually want to speculate in X if he can avoid it. It's in their interest to hold for as short a time as possible, and to make all their money off scalping or "skimming" as you call it. Without some kind of market-maker, the spreads are wider. You can hate the market-maker if you like; but try finding a better way to narrow spreads? I haven't heard of it.
That's how it works, in a nutshell. I'm glossing over a lot of detail, such as rebates and the different ETNs, and a lot of other stuff.
Note, I'm not belonging to an HFT religion. I'm just seeing it as "the worst system except for all the others". I don't believe in just turning these guys loose without regulation or oversight.
You asked for an explanation of how this stuff works, and I've given you my best understanding of it. I don't hold myself out as an expert. I'm just somebody who has been trading a bit, and watching markets since my teens...
If you can find a way to reduce bid-ask spreads without this kind of stuff, then I'll agree. Until then, I can't join the chorus of detractors.
With liquidity in the market, anyone who buys stock gets a narrow spread. Take liquidity out of the market, and you send us back to the dark days when stocks would trade at $1/8th spreads if you were lucky. $1/4 was common. Not only did you pay higher commissions, you paid the spread.
Unless you're pining for the days when you called your broker, paid him a percentage of the trade, and he placed your order in a market with a huge spread then you should be thanking the liquidity providers, not bashing them.
The current system doesn't hurt the little guy. The old system made it so the little guy wouldn't even think about it. I know, because I came of age when the old system was still in place for a few years. Buying in with a $1/4 spread on something trading for $10-$20, and then waiting for a significant percentage gain just to cover the spread??? No thank-you. HFTs? I LOVE them.
1. File a business method patent on "keeping a parking lot so icy that it's hard to walk safely in it."
I would like to cite the parking lots at several places I have worked or studied, as prior art.
OK, so it's not just me. I was thinking TLDR has a new meaning: Too LINKY Didn't Read.
In order to get to the stories, you had to parse all these busy paragraphs and click a link if you were interested.
The title implied it was something like a top-10 list; but it wasn't organized as a list at all.
They should re-do it as a list of links, with just a very brief summary... but really they should just trash the whole thing. It looks like they just found a bunch of tech horror stories, wrote some paragraphs and scattered links in them. Maybe they spent five minutes on this after dumping out the bong water.
My thought too. A lot of places have (and many more had) electric "buses" except they were on tracks with overhead wires. Having a trolley with rubber wheels, and a battery for short-gaps where you haven't built out the overhead wires (or don't want them for aesthetic reasons) makes sense. I heard about a bus like that somewhere in Europe that used flywheel energy storage to traverse a roughly 2km gap between overhead wires. Sorry I don't recall the details on that; but IIRC it was being done more than 20 years ago.
I had to watch it in two sittings
You. You. Watched? (blinks) The whole thing? (stares in disbelief). No. Not possible. (walks away).
Because it's a commodity. As long as the cost of production is less than the market price, you will buy from them. The labor and environmental regulations will affect their profit margin. As the purchaser of a commodity, you don't care about that.
This is true for any fungible commodity. When you buy gold, you don't care if it cost $500/oz or $1000/oz for a particular miner to extract. You only care that it costs $1400/oz.
The DMV does something right? I think we need another study. :)