Surprise me? God no! I'm a died in the wool shit stirring troll, Shakrai, you know that. I play bombastic left wing devil's advocate for any political or economic topic. If I can annoy one idiot, or make one smart person think, my day is complete.
Let me just add here, 'cause I have a lot of replies to catch up on and Slashdot likes to rate limit posts, that I may have been conflating 'day trading' and 'automated trading' in my head. If day trading can't really hurt companies and provides liquidity in the market, it sounds like a legit activity. Fine, let idiots bankrupt themselves as long as it doesn't hurt others or damage the economy.
I know you're trying to give a 30,000ft view of something here, but I'm not sure what. I mean it's natural for people who buy and sell hard assets to try to improve asset value on the sell side and minimize asset value on the buy side. To me that seems like a universal law:-)
It's not, in fact, it's the opposite, it's a degenerate case. The latest economic and game theory experiments have shown that, for most people, in most circumstances where it is possible to enforce fairness, concepts of reciprocity and fairness are far more important motivational factors than self interest. We're born with a sense of fairness and a desire to reciprocate. You may want to look up the dictator game, the public goods game, the ultimatum game, or google 'reciprocity fairness economic experiments.'
Look, I've got a stalker that wastes his time reading my journal posts! How delightful. Look, engaging in polyamory IS useful, especially to undersexed virgins like yourself. By sharing sexual partners and encouraging more sex, even hopeless losers have a better chance of getting laid. And that benefits us all, because hopeless losers who don't get laid tend to go berserk and mow down a bunch of women in a gym class.
Yes to the first, and a qualified no to the second. That is, stock and currency markets shouldn't be a zero sum game, theoretically everyone walks away feeling they have benefited from a trade.
However, the game seems to be to try to make it as close to zero sum as possible, to give as little while taking as much as possible, to trick the other guy into undervaluing his contribution and overvaluing yours, and this is seen as acceptable, nay, Right and Natural.
Ah, see, that's just how I see things. But what do I know, I'm just some pinko socialist America hating commie blaspheming against the great God Mammon.
So before the advent of day trading in the mid 70s, the market had no liquidity, lacked information, and functioned inefficiently? However did we get by for hundreds of years without day trading?
Stock trading is meaningless for day to day operations of a company? So this economic downturn we are in had nothing to do with trading? Companies have no trouble getting enough capital to engage in day to day operations? No layoffs?
Then what is trading for? Is it just a form of gambling?
One cost of day trading is the opportunity cost, all the effort going into something that is, if you are correct, totally useless, could be better spent doing something useful. Being useful certainly isn't required. But being useless shouldn't be respected, should it?
The thing is, we are all in the market. How many people can't retire now, because the value of their 401k has dropped? Are you saying day trading can not affect the value of people's 401k?
It sounds as though you are claiming that all this hair trigger, instant trading has no effect outside of the parties involved, no externalities that affect individuals retirement or other accounts, or even entire economies . And yet, we've all seen lots of articles regarding automated day trading, and how it does exactly that.
Well, the answer to my question seems to be, 'day traders provide market liquidity.' And yet, there were no day traders before the mid '70s. How did the market provide liquidity before then?
I'm not the customer of the pork rendering facility in the next county, and yet I feel no qualms about pressuring them not to dump putrid pork grease into the river. You see, there are these things called 'externalities.' Just because I am not a party to a transaction does not mean I don't have to pay some of the cost of that transaction. And any party to the transaction is only too happy to have someone else bear part of the cost, if they are allowed to push those costs onto someone else. So, why should I pay for the external costs of day trading? Day traders had no small hand in the latest economic collapse, for which we all pay the price.
I wouldn't want to pressure the government into outlawing day trading unless it could be shown to have a very high societal cost versus societal benefit. I just think we as a society should regard day traders as we do used car salesmen, multi level marketers, and other con men who view their customers and trading partners as 'suckers' to be taken advantage of, rather than as real partners in a win-win scenario.
My point is that day traders are the ultimate absentee landlords. A regular investor has a stake in the continued success of a company. A day trader doesn't. People making money off of things whose well being they have no stake in is the root of the Tragedy of the Commons, and pretty much the definition of a financial moral hazard.
Yes. Lets list the communally managed resources: roads, fire departments, police departments, water, sewers, the national parks, the radio spectrum, air... All better managed by governments than private industry. Look what happened in Central and South America when they tried to privatize water.
Day traders are a tiny part of the whole trading ecosystem. They just happen to be the sharks, while most people are the tuna.
I guess I was asking, what's in it for the tuna? Why should a tuna let itself be eaten by a shark, when the tuna is a citizen of a democracy where it can vote to outlaw sharks?
They risk losing their own money, but they create a larger risk to society that they are isolated from. They are basically absentee landlords. They have no vested interest in keeping any company functional. If they can make a profit by killing a company, what's to stop them from doing so?
I came here to either find or make this comment. Good job. Police and prosecutors build their careers on convictions. They have a vested interest in the public believing in the infallibility of fingerprinting. I find this paragraph from the New Scientist article to be key in understanding the controversy of fingerprinting:
No one disputes that fingerprinting is a valuable and generally reliable police tool, but despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated. This is significant because of the criteria governing the admission of scientific evidence in the US courts.
I think I do understand what a moral hazard is. Day traders are isolated from the risks they create, not because of any bail out, but because they can simply reinvest their money into something else after ruining a company. They have no incentive to look after the long term welfare of the companies they invest in. That is a moral hazard. They can create risk for the companies they invest in, while being isolated from that risk.
I'm wondering how day trading, as an activity, benefits society. Sure, if done right, it can benefit the individual, but what use is it to the average person? It seems to promote the tragedy of the privates. That is, privately owned resources will be used unsustainably and depleted because the owner can simply take the profits and reinvest them into rapidly depleting some other resource. Communally managed resources will be used sustainably because no one person can abscond with the profits and reinvest them in some other resource depletion scheme. Day trading seems the perfect example of this. Day traders have no connection with the companies they trade in, no commitment to them, no stake in them at all.
With other industries, one can easily see how they benefit society, yet day trading seems to provide no benefit. Maybe someone who understands the function of day trading better than I do can explain what purpose it serves besides making a few individuals rich at the expense of everyone else. Day trading seems more like gambling than responsible ownership. Doesn't it create an unacceptable moral hazard?
But isn't a poke something sexual anyway? I used to be member of a group called "Enough with poking, let's just have sex". Poking is not what it used to be...
Then please explain why one woman would bother penetrating another woman. You don't think prisons are co-ed, do you? Or that guards routinely rape female prisoners? Seriously, if one woman wants to make another woman her bitch, why would she finger fuck her? Why wouldn't she make the other woman eat her out, or scissor her, or finger her?
Corporations aren't people! Why are you defending a group of people, who already have rights as individuals, as if the group were itself a person deserving of our sympathy? Equating a corporation with historically oppressed groups is simply inaccurate.
Meanings are important, but I've stated what my meaning is. Perhaps I used the wrong words, but we aren't here to debate the meanings of words, we are here to debate what I meant, which is that corporations have too many rights, because they aren't humans. They shouldn't have the same rights as us, they are things, not people.
Corporations exert enormous influence over our daily lives, far more than the King exerted over the American colonists. One person, one vote is fair. One dollar one vote is not, when the corporation exerts even more influence over the lives of the poor than the rich. Maybe you feel we should restrict voting rights to land owners?
I am arguing for limiting the rights of corporations. You have not presented a valid counter argument. We, the actual human citizens, granted them those rights. Corporations, not being human beings, have no moral claim to any rights. They have all the moral claim to rights that automobiles do, they are simply things, not people. We gave them rights because we felt it would benefit us, the humans. If we feel that giving them rights does not benefit us, there is no reason not to revoke those rights.
There. I think I've made my point of view clear, so try to confine your arguments to addressing my actual point, if you can.
You know, I got home last night and my wife, who's at least as liberal as me, was incensed that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Cheapens the institution," was the phrase she used. We've been disappointed in the man for months.
Like it or not, America touches the entire world, the decisions we make impact everyone, so they feel like they get to comment.
We DO have hate crime laws. They just don't trump the Constitution, thankfully. We aren't Europe. Some times, like with health care, I wish we were. But some times I am glad I don't live over there, free speech is kinda important. Even Nazi skinheads deserve free speech.
But we already change criminal sentences based on motivation. A crime of passion is not considered as serious as a premeditated murder. Someone who kills in a fit of rage and jealousy is less likely to do it again than someone who plans a murder in cold blood and carries it out. With hate crimes, we know the person is potentially more dangerous in the future, as their motivation to kill minorities is not likely to just go away.
It's good that you read so many foreign newspapers. Most Americans would just watch, say, the biased Faux News coverage of what 'the rest of the world' is saying and believe that. I'm curious as to which paper's coverage you found the most enlightening?
Show me one case where someone in America has been convicted of a hate crime for speech. Just one case and I will not only admit I am flat out wrong, but work to correct that injustice. You can not find a single case, though, because it has never happened except in certain people's paranoid persecution fantasies.
Please confine your criticism of our government to real injustices. Fighting imaginary injustice is best left to the Unicorn Brigade, that's what they are there for, so you can focus on the real injustices, of which there are plenty.
To try to stay on topic, let me just say how proud I am that our president has won the Nobel Peace Prize. All real patriots are proud when their president wins such a prestigious award, whether he deserves it or not. Really, we all know this was a political decision because Obama has not really done anything worthy of the award. If he had done half the things the Republicans accuse him of, it would be different. But unfortunately for us leftist socialists, he's a fairly hawkish centrist who hasn't done any of the things he promised us he'd do. Still, the world is happy that we have elected someone better than Bush, and this is their way of saying 'thank you, America.' Who are we to reject their heartfelt thanks?
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Surprise me? God no! I'm a died in the wool shit stirring troll, Shakrai, you know that. I play bombastic left wing devil's advocate for any political or economic topic. If I can annoy one idiot, or make one smart person think, my day is complete.
Let me just add here, 'cause I have a lot of replies to catch up on and Slashdot likes to rate limit posts, that I may have been conflating 'day trading' and 'automated trading' in my head. If day trading can't really hurt companies and provides liquidity in the market, it sounds like a legit activity. Fine, let idiots bankrupt themselves as long as it doesn't hurt others or damage the economy.
I know you're trying to give a 30,000ft view of something here, but I'm not sure what. I mean it's natural for people who buy and sell hard assets to try to improve asset value on the sell side and minimize asset value on the buy side. To me that seems like a universal law :-)
It's not, in fact, it's the opposite, it's a degenerate case. The latest economic and game theory experiments have shown that, for most people, in most circumstances where it is possible to enforce fairness, concepts of reciprocity and fairness are far more important motivational factors than self interest. We're born with a sense of fairness and a desire to reciprocate. You may want to look up the dictator game, the public goods game, the ultimatum game, or google 'reciprocity fairness economic experiments.'
Then how did markets function before the advent of day trading in the mid 70s?
Look, I've got a stalker that wastes his time reading my journal posts! How delightful. Look, engaging in polyamory IS useful, especially to undersexed virgins like yourself. By sharing sexual partners and encouraging more sex, even hopeless losers have a better chance of getting laid. And that benefits us all, because hopeless losers who don't get laid tend to go berserk and mow down a bunch of women in a gym class.
Yes to the first, and a qualified no to the second. That is, stock and currency markets shouldn't be a zero sum game, theoretically everyone walks away feeling they have benefited from a trade.
However, the game seems to be to try to make it as close to zero sum as possible, to give as little while taking as much as possible, to trick the other guy into undervaluing his contribution and overvaluing yours, and this is seen as acceptable, nay, Right and Natural.
Ah, see, that's just how I see things. But what do I know, I'm just some pinko socialist America hating commie blaspheming against the great God Mammon.
So before the advent of day trading in the mid 70s, the market had no liquidity, lacked information, and functioned inefficiently? However did we get by for hundreds of years without day trading?
Stock trading is meaningless for day to day operations of a company? So this economic downturn we are in had nothing to do with trading? Companies have no trouble getting enough capital to engage in day to day operations? No layoffs?
Then what is trading for? Is it just a form of gambling?
One cost of day trading is the opportunity cost, all the effort going into something that is, if you are correct, totally useless, could be better spent doing something useful. Being useful certainly isn't required. But being useless shouldn't be respected, should it?
The thing is, we are all in the market. How many people can't retire now, because the value of their 401k has dropped? Are you saying day trading can not affect the value of people's 401k?
It sounds as though you are claiming that all this hair trigger, instant trading has no effect outside of the parties involved, no externalities that affect individuals retirement or other accounts, or even entire economies . And yet, we've all seen lots of articles regarding automated day trading, and how it does exactly that.
Well, the answer to my question seems to be, 'day traders provide market liquidity.' And yet, there were no day traders before the mid '70s. How did the market provide liquidity before then?
I'm not the customer of the pork rendering facility in the next county, and yet I feel no qualms about pressuring them not to dump putrid pork grease into the river. You see, there are these things called 'externalities.' Just because I am not a party to a transaction does not mean I don't have to pay some of the cost of that transaction. And any party to the transaction is only too happy to have someone else bear part of the cost, if they are allowed to push those costs onto someone else. So, why should I pay for the external costs of day trading? Day traders had no small hand in the latest economic collapse, for which we all pay the price.
I wouldn't want to pressure the government into outlawing day trading unless it could be shown to have a very high societal cost versus societal benefit. I just think we as a society should regard day traders as we do used car salesmen, multi level marketers, and other con men who view their customers and trading partners as 'suckers' to be taken advantage of, rather than as real partners in a win-win scenario.
You've just illustrated the Parable of the Broken Window.
My point is that day traders are the ultimate absentee landlords. A regular investor has a stake in the continued success of a company. A day trader doesn't. People making money off of things whose well being they have no stake in is the root of the Tragedy of the Commons, and pretty much the definition of a financial moral hazard.
Yes. Lets list the communally managed resources: roads, fire departments, police departments, water, sewers, the national parks, the radio spectrum, air... All better managed by governments than private industry. Look what happened in Central and South America when they tried to privatize water.
Day traders are a tiny part of the whole trading ecosystem. They just happen to be the sharks, while most people are the tuna.
I guess I was asking, what's in it for the tuna? Why should a tuna let itself be eaten by a shark, when the tuna is a citizen of a democracy where it can vote to outlaw sharks?
They risk losing their own money, but they create a larger risk to society that they are isolated from. They are basically absentee landlords. They have no vested interest in keeping any company functional. If they can make a profit by killing a company, what's to stop them from doing so?
I came here to either find or make this comment. Good job. Police and prosecutors build their careers on convictions. They have a vested interest in the public believing in the infallibility of fingerprinting. I find this paragraph from the New Scientist article to be key in understanding the controversy of fingerprinting:
No one disputes that fingerprinting is a valuable and generally reliable police tool, but despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated. This is significant because of the criteria governing the admission of scientific evidence in the US courts.
I think I do understand what a moral hazard is. Day traders are isolated from the risks they create, not because of any bail out, but because they can simply reinvest their money into something else after ruining a company. They have no incentive to look after the long term welfare of the companies they invest in. That is a moral hazard. They can create risk for the companies they invest in, while being isolated from that risk.
I'm wondering how day trading, as an activity, benefits society. Sure, if done right, it can benefit the individual, but what use is it to the average person? It seems to promote the tragedy of the privates. That is, privately owned resources will be used unsustainably and depleted because the owner can simply take the profits and reinvest them into rapidly depleting some other resource. Communally managed resources will be used sustainably because no one person can abscond with the profits and reinvest them in some other resource depletion scheme. Day trading seems the perfect example of this. Day traders have no connection with the companies they trade in, no commitment to them, no stake in them at all.
With other industries, one can easily see how they benefit society, yet day trading seems to provide no benefit. Maybe someone who understands the function of day trading better than I do can explain what purpose it serves besides making a few individuals rich at the expense of everyone else. Day trading seems more like gambling than responsible ownership. Doesn't it create an unacceptable moral hazard?
But isn't a poke something sexual anyway? I used to be member of a group called "Enough with poking, let's just have sex". Poking is not what it used to be...
You sure about that?
Then please explain why one woman would bother penetrating another woman. You don't think prisons are co-ed, do you? Or that guards routinely rape female prisoners? Seriously, if one woman wants to make another woman her bitch, why would she finger fuck her? Why wouldn't she make the other woman eat her out, or scissor her, or finger her?
I hope she enjoys getting poked in the pokey.
I don't think you understand the mechanics of lesbian sex...
Corporations aren't people! Why are you defending a group of people, who already have rights as individuals, as if the group were itself a person deserving of our sympathy? Equating a corporation with historically oppressed groups is simply inaccurate.
Meanings are important, but I've stated what my meaning is. Perhaps I used the wrong words, but we aren't here to debate the meanings of words, we are here to debate what I meant, which is that corporations have too many rights, because they aren't humans. They shouldn't have the same rights as us, they are things, not people.
Corporations exert enormous influence over our daily lives, far more than the King exerted over the American colonists. One person, one vote is fair. One dollar one vote is not, when the corporation exerts even more influence over the lives of the poor than the rich. Maybe you feel we should restrict voting rights to land owners?
I am arguing for limiting the rights of corporations. You have not presented a valid counter argument. We, the actual human citizens, granted them those rights. Corporations, not being human beings, have no moral claim to any rights. They have all the moral claim to rights that automobiles do, they are simply things, not people. We gave them rights because we felt it would benefit us, the humans. If we feel that giving them rights does not benefit us, there is no reason not to revoke those rights.
There. I think I've made my point of view clear, so try to confine your arguments to addressing my actual point, if you can.
Reminds me of the George Carlin quote, "I've never had a 10, but I've had five 2s in one night."
You know, I got home last night and my wife, who's at least as liberal as me, was incensed that Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. "Cheapens the institution," was the phrase she used. We've been disappointed in the man for months.
Like it or not, America touches the entire world, the decisions we make impact everyone, so they feel like they get to comment.
We DO have hate crime laws. They just don't trump the Constitution, thankfully. We aren't Europe. Some times, like with health care, I wish we were. But some times I am glad I don't live over there, free speech is kinda important. Even Nazi skinheads deserve free speech.
But we already change criminal sentences based on motivation. A crime of passion is not considered as serious as a premeditated murder. Someone who kills in a fit of rage and jealousy is less likely to do it again than someone who plans a murder in cold blood and carries it out. With hate crimes, we know the person is potentially more dangerous in the future, as their motivation to kill minorities is not likely to just go away.
It's good that you read so many foreign newspapers. Most Americans would just watch, say, the biased Faux News coverage of what 'the rest of the world' is saying and believe that. I'm curious as to which paper's coverage you found the most enlightening?
Show me one case where someone in America has been convicted of a hate crime for speech. Just one case and I will not only admit I am flat out wrong, but work to correct that injustice. You can not find a single case, though, because it has never happened except in certain people's paranoid persecution fantasies.
Please confine your criticism of our government to real injustices. Fighting imaginary injustice is best left to the Unicorn Brigade, that's what they are there for, so you can focus on the real injustices, of which there are plenty.
To try to stay on topic, let me just say how proud I am that our president has won the Nobel Peace Prize. All real patriots are proud when their president wins such a prestigious award, whether he deserves it or not. Really, we all know this was a political decision because Obama has not really done anything worthy of the award. If he had done half the things the Republicans accuse him of, it would be different. But unfortunately for us leftist socialists, he's a fairly hawkish centrist who hasn't done any of the things he promised us he'd do. Still, the world is happy that we have elected someone better than Bush, and this is their way of saying 'thank you, America.' Who are we to reject their heartfelt thanks?