How about you and WOOFYGOOFY get together and have a big slap fight. Whoever wins gets to tell the rest of us who's against the wall when the revolution comes.
I'm a supporter of the Tea Party, but these empty threats are reprehensible. The Tea Party isn't about having revolutions for the sake of having revolutions, but to create and maintain a sensible, fiscally responsible, law abiding government. I used to think this sort of craziness at least on Slashdot was contained to climate change nutcases like WOOFYGOOFY, but you proved me wrong.
They're also legally guaranteed benefits that people have been paying for all their lives.
So what? The people getting the guaranteed benefits aren't going to be the ones paying for the guarantee.
Also, Social Security benefits are, last I looked, roughly equal to Social Security taxes.
Twenty years ago they were well below Social Security tax revenue. Twenty years from now, unless the US reduces the benefits, they be well above tax revenue.
Cutting out the Social Security system would result in no real change to the deficit, and tens of millions of irate people who are normally the most likely to vote.
If something can't continue, it won't. Here, it just won't matter how these irate people vote. Their benefits will eventually get reduced. The only question is how much harm to the rest of society will they inflict in the process?
In those situations why should the liquidity be there? When there is great uncertainty, there should be a wide spread and great variability in trading. That encourages people who can stomach the risk to move in and become a market maker.
Sigh, trying this again since I mangled it last time.
The government knowing where you are almost all the time and spying on many of your communications is in a whole different league than them merely having enough information about you to grant you entitlements.
There's nothing silly about it. The latter is an easy gateway to the former since it builds up the database which a government will need for 24/7 spying on its citizens. That's a big reason I oppose them.
I think people are being very foolish to give a government willing to spy on its own citizens without cause all this extra data just because they want more free bread and circuses.
The government knowing where you are almost all the time and spying on many of your communications is in a whole different league than them merely having enough information about you to grant you entitlements./quote
There's nothing silly about it. The latter is an easy gateway to the former since it builds up the database which a government will need for 24/7 spying on its citizens. That's a big reason I oppose them.
Didn't they say that about CDO's, CDS's, and all those other TLA's that blew up the world economy?
They were right. It wasn't CDOs CDSs and all those other TLAs that blew up the world economy, it was 50 to 1 leverage. I wouldn't trust people to invest in US treasuries at 50 to 1 leverage. Something like the recent US government shutdown kerfuffle would have knocked them into bankrupcy.
Yes. How many times do you have to be screwed before you decide something isn't trustworthy?
I doubt you have ever been screwed by HFT. Not even once. But even if you were, you wouldn't be aware of it. Your above fantasy has nothing to do with what actually goes on in the financial world.
Humans must, by definition, use human psychology to make these decisions.
This is incorrect since you haven't explained why human mental processes will come to difference decisions than non-human mental processes.
Let's give an even more constrained example, the game of tic tac toe. After a bit of thought, most humans will come up with a strategy that is perfect, that is by which they can never lose and will win, should the opponent give them the opportunity. The problem is so constrained that human psychology doesn't have a chance to manifest except possibly as a preference for certain squares in symmetrically equivalent moves. Humans, computer programs, and anything else advanced enough to learn to play the game optimally will behave very similarly.
That's the problem with claiming that the study of program trading is the study of human psychology. This is a severely constrained problem which doesn't give much opportunity for the human part to come out.
Not in reality. I notice that typical thru travel times for the Appalachian trail (2100 miles) are between 150 and 210 days which is again close to 10 miles a day.
When I was in college we went on a hike to the bottom of the grand canyon
for a week. None of us were in great shape, did any training, or probably near as fit as a peasant who worked all day in the field
every day yet we averaged about 20-25 miles a day for a week with heavy packs on rough terrain and making camp each night.
Healthy college students - for only a week. A peasant who works all day in a field is not going to be that fit because they aren't doing that sort of exercise and they just wouldn't be that healthy either due to nutrition, disease, and poorly treated injury.
For endurance running a human is every bit as good as a single horse. The pony express used multiple
horses because horses are faster over short distances but over multiple days a human is actually faster. A good runner can do alot
more than 35 miles per day.
And a good horse rider with multiple horses can do a lot better than that. For example, Commanche and Mongol riders could easily do 75 to 100 miles a day by this means.
The article on humans outrunning every animal on the planet is in error since horses are faster with similar endurance. They just can't be carrying a heavy rider all the time.
I'll ask again. Why do you think human psychology is involved here? How would this differ from say an artificial intelligence developing a similar trading system and algorithms?
Actually, yes you can since the "bad" parts have access to the information of the "good" parts. The example you give is from a case where deliberate divisions of power and control were made. Most entitlements don't do that.
Horses are expensive to maintain, and have a rough daily limit of about 30 miles. In comparison, a human walking at 3 mph can go the same distance in only 10 hours.
That's not comparable. The horse could do that forever (for example, see this US cavalry manual which stipulates cavalry can go 35 miles a day, six days a week indefinitely - page 152) while the person would not be able to maintain that sort of pace for more than a few hours to a day unless they were in really good shape.
In comparison, typical indefinite marching rates for an army were about 10 miles a day (both for roman legionaires and US soldiers).
I'm missing how financialization is always productive.
Ok, so you're missing it. I notice that you don't actually have an argument against anything in particular, but you're just complaining that you're not getting it.
But I'm not sure you can show that the ability to buy or sell within nanoseconds positively affects capital utilization more than, say, being able to transact sometime within the next few minutes.
If you're trying to trade something in seconds, then it's nice to have market makers which can react on your time scale. Also, these guys could respond to flash crashes in real time.
Or they can just leave that part of the rulebook alone. I find it puzzling how people are arguing for banning of an activity not on the basis of it causing harm but on the basis that the banning isn't going to cause a lot of harm.
My thinking is that you should have a damn good reason for banning something. Not a vacuous "It doesn't hurt that many people".
So? Why ban HFT then, if that's your only argument? My view on law is that activities that are obviously harmful to other people should be regulated or banned. So if I'm dumping a huge pile of dioxins into the local water supply, then that's an activity that should be stopped. But when it's not, like me wanking to girlie pictures on the internet while hiding in my house, then it shouldn't be banned. HFT falls in that latter category. There's all this magic drama about how HFT is robbing peoples' wallets and even Uncle Sam's quantative easing program, but this isn't based on actual evidence, but rather fantasy arguments coming from peoples' misunderstandings of how markets work.
I probably know it better than most around here, by virtue of having researched it extensively when I almost accepted a job at an HFT firm.
Well, we have the fact that you want to ban HFT on the basis that you personally don't benefit from it (and a faulty zero sum argument you mention in the last post). That indicates both ignorance and a provincial self-centeredness.
The fact that massive investments happen shows that there is money to extract from someone on this transaction (HFT hardware builders, operators, banks), but in the end that money has to come from somewhere
HFT has only one purpose nowadays, to suck the $85bil USD in quantitative easing money (QE) that our federal government pumps into the market every month *out* of the market in light speed.
Getting government to buy your weak bonds would be more effective a tactic than trading really fast.
They are never an endpoint for a trade, they put themselves in the middle of a buy-sell 99.999% of the time.
That's what market makers do. They aren't going to buy a zillion shares of company X merely because everyone is selling it. They trade with the expectation that they'll be able to unload the trade at a slightly advantageous cost.
Then why the fuck is this legal? How can a democratic system allow something like this to exist?
Because there's no reason to make it illegal. No one is actually being harmed by the activity in question aside from a few computer traders with shitty code and maybe a few idiots with stop loss orders.
Slashdot Mirror
How about you and WOOFYGOOFY get together and have a big slap fight. Whoever wins gets to tell the rest of us who's against the wall when the revolution comes.
I'm a supporter of the Tea Party, but these empty threats are reprehensible. The Tea Party isn't about having revolutions for the sake of having revolutions, but to create and maintain a sensible, fiscally responsible, law abiding government. I used to think this sort of craziness at least on Slashdot was contained to climate change nutcases like WOOFYGOOFY, but you proved me wrong.
They're also legally guaranteed benefits that people have been paying for all their lives.
So what? The people getting the guaranteed benefits aren't going to be the ones paying for the guarantee.
Also, Social Security benefits are, last I looked, roughly equal to Social Security taxes.
Twenty years ago they were well below Social Security tax revenue. Twenty years from now, unless the US reduces the benefits, they be well above tax revenue.
Cutting out the Social Security system would result in no real change to the deficit, and tens of millions of irate people who are normally the most likely to vote.
If something can't continue, it won't. Here, it just won't matter how these irate people vote. Their benefits will eventually get reduced. The only question is how much harm to the rest of society will they inflict in the process?
In those situations why should the liquidity be there? When there is great uncertainty, there should be a wide spread and great variability in trading. That encourages people who can stomach the risk to move in and become a market maker.
The government knowing where you are almost all the time and spying on many of your communications is in a whole different league than them merely having enough information about you to grant you entitlements.
There's nothing silly about it. The latter is an easy gateway to the former since it builds up the database which a government will need for 24/7 spying on its citizens. That's a big reason I oppose them.
I think people are being very foolish to give a government willing to spy on its own citizens without cause all this extra data just because they want more free bread and circuses.
When there is no evidence but only Snowden's unsupported allegations, how do we react?
You miss my point. This isn't the situation we are in! We have evidence supporting Snowden's allegations.
The government knowing where you are almost all the time and spying on many of your communications is in a whole different league than them merely having enough information about you to grant you entitlements./quote There's nothing silly about it. The latter is an easy gateway to the former since it builds up the database which a government will need for 24/7 spying on its citizens. That's a big reason I oppose them.
Didn't they say that about CDO's, CDS's, and all those other TLA's that blew up the world economy?
They were right. It wasn't CDOs CDSs and all those other TLAs that blew up the world economy, it was 50 to 1 leverage. I wouldn't trust people to invest in US treasuries at 50 to 1 leverage. Something like the recent US government shutdown kerfuffle would have knocked them into bankrupcy.
Yes. How many times do you have to be screwed before you decide something isn't trustworthy?
I doubt you have ever been screwed by HFT. Not even once. But even if you were, you wouldn't be aware of it. Your above fantasy has nothing to do with what actually goes on in the financial world.
Humans must, by definition, use human psychology to make these decisions.
This is incorrect since you haven't explained why human mental processes will come to difference decisions than non-human mental processes.
Let's give an even more constrained example, the game of tic tac toe. After a bit of thought, most humans will come up with a strategy that is perfect, that is by which they can never lose and will win, should the opponent give them the opportunity. The problem is so constrained that human psychology doesn't have a chance to manifest except possibly as a preference for certain squares in symmetrically equivalent moves. Humans, computer programs, and anything else advanced enough to learn to play the game optimally will behave very similarly.
That's the problem with claiming that the study of program trading is the study of human psychology. This is a severely constrained problem which doesn't give much opportunity for the human part to come out.
They are called market makers as well. There's no point to your argument.
A human can keep up a 3mph walk forever as well.
Not in reality. I notice that typical thru travel times for the Appalachian trail (2100 miles) are between 150 and 210 days which is again close to 10 miles a day.
When I was in college we went on a hike to the bottom of the grand canyon for a week. None of us were in great shape, did any training, or probably near as fit as a peasant who worked all day in the field every day yet we averaged about 20-25 miles a day for a week with heavy packs on rough terrain and making camp each night.
Healthy college students - for only a week. A peasant who works all day in a field is not going to be that fit because they aren't doing that sort of exercise and they just wouldn't be that healthy either due to nutrition, disease, and poorly treated injury.
For endurance running a human is every bit as good as a single horse. The pony express used multiple horses because horses are faster over short distances but over multiple days a human is actually faster. A good runner can do alot more than 35 miles per day.
And a good horse rider with multiple horses can do a lot better than that. For example, Commanche and Mongol riders could easily do 75 to 100 miles a day by this means.
The article on humans outrunning every animal on the planet is in error since horses are faster with similar endurance. They just can't be carrying a heavy rider all the time.
I think you missed a word there: necessary.
So what? Should we be banning or restricting activities because they aren't "necessary" to a hostile observer?
Humans design the systems and algorithms.
I'll ask again. Why do you think human psychology is involved here? How would this differ from say an artificial intelligence developing a similar trading system and algorithms?
Actually, yes you can since the "bad" parts have access to the information of the "good" parts. The example you give is from a case where deliberate divisions of power and control were made. Most entitlements don't do that.
Horses are expensive to maintain, and have a rough daily limit of about 30 miles. In comparison, a human walking at 3 mph can go the same distance in only 10 hours.
That's not comparable. The horse could do that forever (for example, see this US cavalry manual which stipulates cavalry can go 35 miles a day, six days a week indefinitely - page 152) while the person would not be able to maintain that sort of pace for more than a few hours to a day unless they were in really good shape.
In comparison, typical indefinite marching rates for an army were about 10 miles a day (both for roman legionaires and US soldiers).
I'm missing how financialization is always productive.
Ok, so you're missing it. I notice that you don't actually have an argument against anything in particular, but you're just complaining that you're not getting it.
But I'm not sure you can show that the ability to buy or sell within nanoseconds positively affects capital utilization more than, say, being able to transact sometime within the next few minutes.
If you're trying to trade something in seconds, then it's nice to have market makers which can react on your time scale. Also, these guys could respond to flash crashes in real time.
Market makers are obligated to sell or buy at their posted prices.
No, that's a subclass of market makers. The rest don't have that obligation.
Or they can just leave that part of the rulebook alone. I find it puzzling how people are arguing for banning of an activity not on the basis of it causing harm but on the basis that the banning isn't going to cause a lot of harm.
My thinking is that you should have a damn good reason for banning something. Not a vacuous "It doesn't hurt that many people".
So? Why ban HFT then, if that's your only argument? My view on law is that activities that are obviously harmful to other people should be regulated or banned. So if I'm dumping a huge pile of dioxins into the local water supply, then that's an activity that should be stopped. But when it's not, like me wanking to girlie pictures on the internet while hiding in my house, then it shouldn't be banned. HFT falls in that latter category. There's all this magic drama about how HFT is robbing peoples' wallets and even Uncle Sam's quantative easing program, but this isn't based on actual evidence, but rather fantasy arguments coming from peoples' misunderstandings of how markets work.
I probably know it better than most around here, by virtue of having researched it extensively when I almost accepted a job at an HFT firm.
Well, we have the fact that you want to ban HFT on the basis that you personally don't benefit from it (and a faulty zero sum argument you mention in the last post). That indicates both ignorance and a provincial self-centeredness.
The fact that massive investments happen shows that there is money to extract from someone on this transaction (HFT hardware builders, operators, banks), but in the end that money has to come from somewhere
Trading isn't a zero sum game.
HFT has only one purpose nowadays, to suck the $85bil USD in quantitative easing money (QE) that our federal government pumps into the market every month *out* of the market in light speed.
Getting government to buy your weak bonds would be more effective a tactic than trading really fast.
They are never an endpoint for a trade, they put themselves in the middle of a buy-sell 99.999% of the time.
That's what market makers do. They aren't going to buy a zillion shares of company X merely because everyone is selling it. They trade with the expectation that they'll be able to unload the trade at a slightly advantageous cost.
Do these economists have any understanding of science or psychology?
Ok, how does human psychology have any impact on millisecond trading?
Even if things screws up badly and big banks behind it gets hit, they will be bailed out, is a no risk bet.
Why would banks need to be bailed out? Hint: ridiculous levels of leverage, which have nothing to do with HFT.
Then why the fuck is this legal? How can a democratic system allow something like this to exist?
Because there's no reason to make it illegal. No one is actually being harmed by the activity in question aside from a few computer traders with shitty code and maybe a few idiots with stop loss orders.