Actually, they do have a better position in the market. They have a very high speed and low latency connection and use their clout to demand it.
As does any brokerage house of any significant size.
The 'liquidity' they add to the market is illusory. There is likely enough liquidity to perform trades at reasonable speed without them. That is provided by fund managers keeping a widely diversified portfolio.
(A) Only in heavily traded stocks - the vast majority of the market is thinly traded. (B) Huh? Diversification within funds has nothing to do with market liquidity, although a lack of market liquidity can certainly hurt a fund, just like any other investor.
Multicast doesn't help because no significant ISPs support multicast. You either tunnel it with something like MBONE - which is far beyond the ability of most users, or your routers have to be configured to participate. You might be able to do multicast between computers on a single ISP - depends on just what they have or have not done with their routers, but its only a handful of ISPs world-wide that support multicast over the internet.
Presuming that the people most likely to have the information to turn in are the ones who like kiddie porn in the first place, yes $5K is not going to be anywhere near enough to encourage them to rat out a supplier. I think $50K is probably closer to what it would take.
Yes. And when I clarified, you rejected my clarification
You clarified by calling me an asshole for reading what you wrote. Obviously I knew what you meant after you finally wrote what you meant. That you want to argue about your response is a complete concession of your original ill-mannered attack, even if you only did it out of frustration.
And honestly it's a pretty valid argument. This is definitely going to be informative, but I'm just as interested in how a particular SSD handles the flash blocks failing as when they fail. A SSD with flash that averages 1,000,000 writes before blocks start to fail but does it gracefully with little/no data loss could be better than one that averages 2,000,000 but goes out in a blaze of glory as soon as the first block fails.
Flash fails on write - if the write succeeds, you will be able to read it baring catastrophic events like ESD exposure.
If police need search warrants they can find other ways to get them but having a search warrant which only leads to digital copies of evidence of the crime does not actually solve or prevent the crime.
But it sure makes for good PR. Much better headlines to say you've busted hundreds of icky pervs than to say you busted one guy who has a well documented track record of hurting kids.
Cite your dictionary. If it ain't merriam-webster, you are cherry picking from non-authoritative sources.
And, since I know it's not merriam-webster here's a restatement of my second point - the context of your usage did not indicate in any way whatsover that the definition you were thinking about in your head was the one you've now cherry-picked - in fact it indicated otherwise because you used no modifiers to indicate a change in scale, you left it at the binary meaning.
You can give them an alternate billing address - which is with address they will give to the spammers. Doesn't protect you from the government or a subpoena, but it stops just about everybody else. And yes, I did that too.
Dunno where you're from. I was required to give name and SS # signing up for a line yesterday.
They want the SS# so they can run a credit check. If you have bad credit they will require the cash deposit. Or you can just volunteer to make the cash deposit and skip the SS# - you just have to ask, because by default they assume you would rather give your SS# instead of give them a deposit.
Perhaps there were major abuses when the market was just paper, but they weren't systemic to the point that the HFT game is. They weren't abuses that caused thousand point crashes within sixteen minutes. It's the scale that has people scared, and not without good reason.
The 'abuse' was the lack of buyers for a massive open market sell order. One or more dumbasses decided to sell way more shares than there were buyers at reasonable prices. When all the reasonable buyers got their fill, all that was left were the guys ready to take advantage of dumbasses like that. That the pricing levels recovered so quickly was due to the HF traders jumping in. Sure it was a novel event, but the impact was more on television news than on the market. Though it is probably safe to say that the systems of the traders which permitted such foolishly large sells have been revamped.
Actually, it IS rent seeking. They do absolutely no productive thing and yet the money flows by virtue of them wedging themselves into the market. That's the very foundation of rent seeking.
Except that they are adding value by increasing liquidity - they are acting like thousands of micro-market-makers with micro-spreads instead of the comparatively massive spread of traditional market makers.. Nor are they 'wedging' themselves anywhere, they have no more control over the market than any other participant.
My impression is that they abused people with open market orders. I'm sure its more complicated than that, you can read up on it by googling 'late trading.'
Sorry, that's a lot of hand-waving. The HF traders deal with micro-fluctuations in the share price. It's not like they are naked short selling a company into the toilet.
Don't be ridiculous - the first two definitions clearly indicate a binary state change:
1a : to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right : corrupt 1b : to cause to turn aside or away from what is generally done or accepted : misdirect
The remaining two strongly imply a similar state change, they just emphasize the final state rather than the starting state:
2a : to divert to a wrong end or purpose : misuse 2b: to twist the meaning or sense of : misinterpret
Perhaps you'd have preferred that I have "further" inserted there, but the lack of that word doesn't mean that the previous system wasn't perverted.
Except that's precisely what it means. To pervert something is to change it from the state of purity to the state of corruption. To further pervert it is to make it worse, not change states. Enormous difference, especially when the rest of the context of your post does absolutely nothing to indicate anything about the state before the perversion. In other words you didn't say one damn thing about the paper system having its own share of problems, hence you gave multiple consistent points of reinforcement to the obvious interpretation of your words.
So no, I don't prefer anything. You, on other hand, seem to prefer that people read your mind instead of what you write. You might want to ponder why you get so angry when they don't.
You do NOT need to give the phone company an ID for a landline. Last time I had a landline, all they needed was a cash deposit of around $100. I gave them a completely bogus name because I didn't want to pay extra to have my name removed from the phonebook (nor did I want to be on the list of people who have paid to keep their name out of the phone book either).
It's been perverted from the paper trading to a good-ol-boys network of computers with systemic abuses aimed at hurting people trying to use the system in good faith.
You can't pervert something that is already perverted - something is either corrupt or it is not. Hence you wrote that the paper system was not perverted. Perhaps YOU should read what's written, not what you were thinking when you wrote it. And while you are at it, you might want to try adding a little bit of that civilized conversation too.
I'm fine with high frequency trading. I'm not fine with "30 millisecond advantage" trading
Yep, that's bullshit. It's no different than what was going on a couple of years ago where privileged fund managers had special access overnight while everybody else had to wait until dawn (not just everday off-the-exchange 'after market' trades but trades at the market closing price even if there was news that would assuredly move the share pricing as soon as the market opened).
What is the purpose of the stock markets? Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade?
False dichotomy. It is quite possible, and I would say almost certain, that they can be both. For every buy, there is a willing seller and if both parties are AI's - what's the downside? It's not like anyone who is actually a producer is losing money when one AI out-predicts another AI on the share price 3 seconds into the future. People are constantly harping on HF trading as it all downside and no upside - but when pressed on it, very few, if any, can put together a logical argument to back up their beliefs. The biggest article of faith right now is that the spike a week or two ago was caused by HF trading when what really happened was somebody made a real big market-order to sell and the buyers dried up until the HF guys jumped in, at which point the pricing stabilized.
Shuffling money around constantly and making the only "productive" part the cut you get for the shuffling (not the actual thing you invested in) completely defeats that purpose. It's called RENT SEEKING by the banks and traders, and it's a BAD THING.
No, it's not. Arbitrage is a much closer definition to what's going on - they are trying to treat one big market as if it were a bunch of micro-markets (as the time between trades gets shorter it effectively breaks the market up based on ranges of trading speed) and are looking to profit on the difference between them. If they were actively trying to screw with the markets - like pulling a pump-and-dump scheme, or bribing politicians for favorable laws, that would be a form of rent-seeking. But millisecond gambles on minute fluctuations in price is not rent-seeking any more than year-long gambles on large fluctuations in price is rent-seeking.
It encourages money to be allocated poorly in a short sited fashion, only doing whatever will make the most commission for the trader and his company. It does the opposite of what the stock market was supposed to do.
You are confused here. Sure there are people who think they can be individual players doing high-frequency trades and there are brokers willing to accommodate them. But they are a drop in the sea. The real money moving around is coming from funds, mostly the kind that are only available to high net-worth people. Those fund managers aren't trying to maximize brokerage fees, they charge a management fee regardless of the number of trades. Sure they may manipulate the system to max out any performance-based bonuses, but that's a common problem with any sort of fund, not just the ones that do high-frequency trading.
this system rewards people who produce nothing of value, make nothing, enrich no one's lives, do not create art, do not expand the sphere of human knowledge, and provide no meaningful service to humanity or the country.
If only it were so simple. Efficient allocation of capital is extremely useful. It enables all kinds of progressive development that would never occur otherwise and stock markets (and derivative markets) are the best way humanity has come up with to do it. You might as well be arguing that farmers' markets and cattle auctions are just as useless - all they do is provide a meeting place and a means to buy and sell - they create nothing.
It should come as no surprise that the system can and is abused - that's pretty much the case for every system man has ever come up with. But to argue that capital markets are nothing more than siphons from the poor to the rich is to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please. These guys are no more unnecessary middlemen than google is.
Actually, they do have a better position in the market. They have a very high speed and low latency connection and use their clout to demand it.
As does any brokerage house of any significant size.
The 'liquidity' they add to the market is illusory. There is likely enough liquidity to perform trades at reasonable speed without them. That is provided by fund managers keeping a widely diversified portfolio.
(A) Only in heavily traded stocks - the vast majority of the market is thinly traded.
(B) Huh? Diversification within funds has nothing to do with market liquidity, although a lack of market liquidity can certainly hurt a fund, just like any other investor.
Multicast doesn't help because no significant ISPs support multicast. You either tunnel it with something like MBONE - which is far beyond the ability of most users, or your routers have to be configured to participate. You might be able to do multicast between computers on a single ISP - depends on just what they have or have not done with their routers, but its only a handful of ISPs world-wide that support multicast over the internet.
Presuming that the people most likely to have the information to turn in are the ones who like kiddie porn in the first place, yes $5K is not going to be anywhere near enough to encourage them to rat out a supplier. I think $50K is probably closer to what it would take.
Yes. And when I clarified, you rejected my clarification
You clarified by calling me an asshole for reading what you wrote.
Obviously I knew what you meant after you finally wrote what you meant.
That you want to argue about your response is a complete concession of your original ill-mannered attack, even if you only did it out of frustration.
And honestly it's a pretty valid argument. This is definitely going to be informative, but I'm just as interested in how a particular SSD handles the flash blocks failing as when they fail. A SSD with flash that averages 1,000,000 writes before blocks start to fail but does it gracefully with little/no data loss could be better than one that averages 2,000,000 but goes out in a blaze of glory as soon as the first block fails.
Flash fails on write - if the write succeeds, you will be able to read it baring catastrophic events like ESD exposure.
If police need search warrants they can find other ways to get them but having a search warrant which only leads to digital copies of evidence of the crime does not actually solve or prevent the crime.
But it sure makes for good PR. Much better headlines to say you've busted hundreds of icky pervs than to say you busted one guy who has a well documented track record of hurting kids.
Cite your dictionary. If it ain't merriam-webster, you are cherry picking from non-authoritative sources.
And, since I know it's not merriam-webster here's a restatement of my second point - the context of your usage did not indicate in any way whatsover that the definition you were thinking about in your head was the one you've now cherry-picked - in fact it indicated otherwise because you used no modifiers to indicate a change in scale, you left it at the binary meaning.
Or pregnant with twins, triplets, or octuplets. There are degrees of just about everything. :-)
Precisely my point about "otherwise specified." Those are modifiers that are universally specified when talking about those cases.
You can give them an alternate billing address - which is with address they will give to the spammers.
Doesn't protect you from the government or a subpoena, but it stops just about everybody else.
And yes, I did that too.
Dunno where you're from. I was required to give name and SS # signing up for a line yesterday.
They want the SS# so they can run a credit check. If you have bad credit they will require the cash deposit.
Or you can just volunteer to make the cash deposit and skip the SS# - you just have to ask, because by default they assume you would rather give your SS# instead of give them a deposit.
How many degrees away from true makes the binary transition in state? :-)
One, unless otherwise specified.
It's like being a little bit pregnant.
Perhaps there were major abuses when the market was just paper, but they weren't systemic to the point that the HFT game is. They weren't abuses that caused thousand point crashes within sixteen minutes. It's the scale that has people scared, and not without good reason.
The 'abuse' was the lack of buyers for a massive open market sell order. One or more dumbasses decided to sell way more shares than there were buyers at reasonable prices. When all the reasonable buyers got their fill, all that was left were the guys ready to take advantage of dumbasses like that. That the pricing levels recovered so quickly was due to the HF traders jumping in. Sure it was a novel event, but the impact was more on television news than on the market. Though it is probably safe to say that the systems of the traders which permitted such foolishly large sells have been revamped.
Actually, it IS rent seeking. They do absolutely no productive thing and yet the money flows by virtue of them wedging themselves into the market. That's the very foundation of rent seeking.
Except that they are adding value by increasing liquidity - they are acting like thousands of micro-market-makers with micro-spreads instead of the comparatively massive spread of traditional market makers.. Nor are they 'wedging' themselves anywhere, they have no more control over the market than any other participant.
My impression is that they abused people with open market orders. I'm sure its more complicated than that, you can read up on it by googling 'late trading.'
Sorry, that's a lot of hand-waving. The HF traders deal with micro-fluctuations in the share price. It's not like they are naked short selling a company into the toilet.
Don't be ridiculous - the first two definitions clearly indicate a binary state change:
1a : to cause to turn aside or away from what is good or true or morally right : corrupt
1b : to cause to turn aside or away from what is generally done or accepted : misdirect
The remaining two strongly imply a similar state change, they just emphasize the final state rather than the starting state:
2a : to divert to a wrong end or purpose : misuse
2b: to twist the meaning or sense of : misinterpret
Perhaps you'd have preferred that I have "further" inserted there, but the lack of that word doesn't mean that the previous system wasn't perverted.
Except that's precisely what it means. To pervert something is to change it from the state of purity to the state of corruption. To further pervert it is to make it worse, not change states. Enormous difference, especially when the rest of the context of your post does absolutely nothing to indicate anything about the state before the perversion. In other words you didn't say one damn thing about the paper system having its own share of problems, hence you gave multiple consistent points of reinforcement to the obvious interpretation of your words.
So no, I don't prefer anything. You, on other hand, seem to prefer that people read your mind instead of what you write. You might want to ponder why you get so angry when they don't.
You do NOT need to give the phone company an ID for a landline.
Last time I had a landline, all they needed was a cash deposit of around $100.
I gave them a completely bogus name because I didn't want to pay extra to have my name removed from the phonebook (nor did I want to be on the list of people who have paid to keep their name out of the phone book either).
It's been perverted from the paper trading to a good-ol-boys network of computers with systemic abuses aimed at hurting people trying to use the system in good faith.
You can't pervert something that is already perverted - something is either corrupt or it is not. Hence you wrote that the paper system was not perverted.
Perhaps YOU should read what's written, not what you were thinking when you wrote it.
And while you are at it, you might want to try adding a little bit of that civilized conversation too.
I'm fine with high frequency trading. I'm not fine with "30 millisecond advantage" trading
Yep, that's bullshit. It's no different than what was going on a couple of years ago where privileged fund managers had special access overnight while everybody else had to wait until dawn (not just everday off-the-exchange 'after market' trades but trades at the market closing price even if there was news that would assuredly move the share pricing as soon as the market opened).
Do you honestly believe there were no systemic abuses when it was all paper? That just seems so incredibly naive.
What is the purpose of the stock markets? Are they meant to be a video game played by A.I.'s for big cash prizes, or a way of facilitating investment and trade?
False dichotomy. It is quite possible, and I would say almost certain, that they can be both. For every buy, there is a willing seller and if both parties are AI's - what's the downside? It's not like anyone who is actually a producer is losing money when one AI out-predicts another AI on the share price 3 seconds into the future. People are constantly harping on HF trading as it all downside and no upside - but when pressed on it, very few, if any, can put together a logical argument to back up their beliefs. The biggest article of faith right now is that the spike a week or two ago was caused by HF trading when what really happened was somebody made a real big market-order to sell and the buyers dried up until the HF guys jumped in, at which point the pricing stabilized.
Shuffling money around constantly and making the only "productive" part the cut you get for the shuffling (not the actual thing you invested in) completely defeats that purpose. It's called RENT SEEKING by the banks and traders, and it's a BAD THING.
No, it's not. Arbitrage is a much closer definition to what's going on - they are trying to treat one big market as if it were a bunch of micro-markets (as the time between trades gets shorter it effectively breaks the market up based on ranges of trading speed) and are looking to profit on the difference between them. If they were actively trying to screw with the markets - like pulling a pump-and-dump scheme, or bribing politicians for favorable laws, that would be a form of rent-seeking. But millisecond gambles on minute fluctuations in price is not rent-seeking any more than year-long gambles on large fluctuations in price is rent-seeking.
It encourages money to be allocated poorly in a short sited fashion, only doing whatever will make the most commission for the trader and his company. It does the opposite of what the stock market was supposed to do.
You are confused here. Sure there are people who think they can be individual players doing high-frequency trades and there are brokers willing to accommodate them. But they are a drop in the sea. The real money moving around is coming from funds, mostly the kind that are only available to high net-worth people. Those fund managers aren't trying to maximize brokerage fees, they charge a management fee regardless of the number of trades. Sure they may manipulate the system to max out any performance-based bonuses, but that's a common problem with any sort of fund, not just the ones that do high-frequency trading.
this system rewards people who produce nothing of value, make nothing, enrich no one's lives, do not create art, do not expand the sphere of human knowledge, and provide no meaningful service to humanity or the country.
If only it were so simple. Efficient allocation of capital is extremely useful. It enables all kinds of progressive development that would never occur otherwise and stock markets (and derivative markets) are the best way humanity has come up with to do it. You might as well be arguing that farmers' markets and cattle auctions are just as useless - all they do is provide a meeting place and a means to buy and sell - they create nothing.
It should come as no surprise that the system can and is abused - that's pretty much the case for every system man has ever come up with. But to argue that capital markets are nothing more than siphons from the poor to the rich is to throw the baby out with the bath water.