Your argument that HFT constitutes a tax without adding value is a little shaky.
Every sale you make, will generate less profit. Everything you buy will be more expensive.
Short rebuttal:
Every trade you make will likely execute faster, because an HFT was willing to take the other side. You may miss out on price improvement, but you will be able to dispose of your position risk faster, because the HFT is accepting that risk in the hopes of turning a profit.
Elaboration:
Any serious investor who does not want to immediately lose his or her shirt should be using limit orders. For example, I might want to sell 100 shares of AAPL at $398.00. I don't care who takes the other side; I just make an open contract to sell AAPL at that given price, and some anonymous market participant accepts that contract. In this case, the value that an HFT offers me is the liquidity (yes, I said it), whereby my order to buy those shares might be crossed nearly immediately, even though it was a resting offer (i.e. it did not cross any existing buy order in the marketplace). As an investor, I am able to sell quickly at the price I want.
The HFT will then try to sell those shares they've bought from me at a higher price. So - what has the HFT done to deserve said profit? They've taken on risk. I was able to sell my shares at $398.00 like I wanted, and now the HFT is stuck managing the position that I no longer wanted to hold. They're now long 100 shares of AAPL at $398.00, and while they're betting that they can sell them to somebody else at $398.01 or $398.05, it's also quite possible that AAPL will decline to $397.50 over the next few minutes, in which case the HFT will likely have booked the loss at $397.9x and moved on to their next trade.
In this case, the HFT is acting as a market-maker, which is a function that traders at financial firms have provided since markets have existed. What's the difference between today's HFT and yesterday's phone brokers? They do it faster; and they don't typically get the huge commission breaks or shoulder the liquidity obligations of traditional market-makers.
Another typical role an HFT plays is that of an arbitrageur. Arbitrage is buying and selling a set of instruments that results in an immediate profit with little risk; the only major risk involved is execution risk - that someone would beat the arbitrageur to the prices he saw in the market. Again, this might seem a useless activity, sucking up pennies by getting information faster. But consider a simple example: two futures exchanges, one in the US (the CME) and one in Europe (the ICE), both list heating oil. I, a hotel owner, want to hedge my building's exposure to heating oil price changes, so I submit a limit order to buy 10 heating oil futures (delivering contracts at the CME at $3.0000/gallon. I can only afford to pay for access to the CME, but an arbitrageur has access to both CME and ICE. The arbitrageur sees my order to buy 10 contracts at $3.0000/gallon on CME, but also sees an order to sell 30 contracts at $2.9999/gallon on ICE. He decides to sell me 10 contracts at $3.0000 and buy 10 of the 30 available contracts on ICE at $2.9999, locking in a whopping $42 profit.
So what value did the HFT provide to the market? He created an effective liquidity channel between the two disparate exchanges. And what specific value did he provide to me, the business owner? He gave me access to liquidity on an exchange that I could not afford to access. In a sense, I paid him $42 to do this. If I could afford to do it more cheaply myself, I would have. In this sense, he actually provides this liquidity channel for cheaper than I could have achieved otherwise. And what risk did he take? He took the risk that one of his orders did not execute against the market price he saw. Imagine that he is US-based as well, and sold me those ten contracts at $3.0000, but someone in Europe happened to buy those 30 c
We're in huge trouble as a country because a completely different sector of the financial industry was irresponsible in the way they lent money. Making high-frequency trading the scapegoat is not going to solve our problems.
As for high-frequency trading itself, I don't see the cause for disgust. Traders of all kinds (that is, people who exchange things with willing participants) try to optimize their revenue, as do most for-profit businesses. If your argument is that for-profit activities in general are the reason our country is in trouble, then I suppose I won't convince you of anything. If your argument is instead that doing business faster than others is immoral, I'd like to see a little more of the rationale.
The fun part is virtualization. In virtualization, you buy four rooms and call them an office, but it's a magical office, where the building managers can choose to swap out the rooms, plumbing, and electricity at any time, but you can't tell because they paint it all to look exactly the same. Creepy, huh?
We use SSH tunnels all the time at work to hop from server to server on different subnets. Any clever college student could figure it out, and the teacher would be none the wiser, unless he had packet sniffers on the network.
If the companies did in fact go along with the President's orders because there was money in it, can we fight back the same way? If money trumps the rule of law, a boycott should be organized to switch, en masse, to providers that refused to perform warrantless wiretapping. Does such a boycott exist?
This is nitpicking: the car doesn't actually use water as fuel; it uses hydrogen. The hydrogen is simply generated by splitting water. For the company to claim that the car uses water as fuel, they'd have to actually be burning water somehow. Instead, water is the precursor to the fuel, and the byproduct of the burning.
For example, the current equivalent would be to claim that cars run on carbon dioxide, when in fact the fuel for the car was originally synthesized (by photosynthesis and subsequently by kerogen pyrolysis) from carbon dioxide, and produces carbon dioxide when burned.
I have a few close personal friends who do make a living off playing music, but it always becomes fairly hectic... you always have to be gigging to stay afloat. The thing is, most musicians who are not famous and touring end up doing a lot of teaching, which usually pays quite well, depending on the community. Sure, that's sort of an office job, but it's not quite the same as an IT guy or paper pusher.
Along with many others, I am a firm supporter of using records as advertisements for live shows. That said, it does require a good deal of money to record, produce, manufacture, and distribute an album. Happily, that's where the internet can come in doubly handy: it obviates manufacture and enables near-costless distribution (via P2P).
To be honest, I think that a lot of the record industry's problems could be solved if they improved the quality and lowered the cost of online music. Many people (myself included) pirate music from time to time because it's a) relatively easily available, and b) free. If there were a legitimized version of MP3Sparks charging the same prices, I think the record companies would see a lot more online sales. I am loathe to spend $12 on a new CD, especially in crappy 128 or 160kbps MP3 format, but give me 256k or lossless for $5 per CD and I'd start buying up a whole collection. Make it part of a social network community with easy music suggestion and you've got a goldmine.
Graphic designers may only compose 0.5% of the general population, but they compose an order (or two) of magnitude more of the real population of interest here: serious Photoshop users.
I love The GIMP and have used it in lieu of Photoshop for many years, but for all its great features, it still can't compete on quite the same level as Phototshop for professional graphic designers.
This mission actually cares a lot more about the ice underneath the rover. If thrusters did remove some of the material covering that ice layer, that would only make the digging step easier.
The beauty of the internet is that you can have both sites, and the end user can choose the one they prefer.
A file-sharing parallel would have been TPB vs. OiNK. Both serve a similar purpose, but one is more heavily moderated by the community. It is then up to the individual to choose which model best fits their needs.
And please, no vegan rants - England looked at a random sampling of 1000 people who reached the age of 100, and only 4 were vegetarians, all the rest ate meat routinely.
To be fair, such a statistic tells us very little about the relative health benefits of those eating habits. A more appropriate statistic would quote the percentage of meat-eaters who make it to 100 versus the percentage of vegetarians who make it to 100. There are of course confounding factors - vegetarians might be more health-conscious in general - but at least we'd actually be measuring the same variable in two separate groups, rather than simply counting the number of vegetarians per 1000 people of a certain age.
Indeed. It would be very interesting to see whether this technology could be used to disrupt hippocampal memory formation. Sort of a short-term version of that MIB flasher...
While I respect your high level of experience in the field, I disagree with the multicore prognosis you suggest.
Throughout history, especially in the computing industry, experts have incorrectly come to the consensus that the next step in technology is unnecessary. I think that Intel is banking on experts like yourself being again shortsighted. In the past, we've seen software expand to saturate the capabilities of almost every device on the market.
If they build it, software (and demand) will come.
"I have modern microcontrollers in my parts box with 64 *bytes* of RAM and 1kbyte of flash (Atmel ATtiny13)"
Indeed. I am a senior in Biomedical Engineering (Electronic Instrumentation focus) at a major US university, and assembly language was a required component of my curriculum. It turns out to have come very much in handy: I am currently working on a project using a TI MSP430 with 128B RAM and 2kB flash in conjunction with a sensor to detect apnea in premature infants. Because the processor specs are so miniscule, not only does the processor cost less than $1, but it also runs at only 220 microamps. This can give us a battery life of roughly 3 months on a watch battery. The entire application logic and signal processing algorithm will be coded in assembly.
There's a significant difference between obsolete and esoteric.
I did not investigate the work required to restore DTrace functionality on Apple systems, but it seems like it was not impossibly difficult. Wouldn't Apple engineers figure that their attempts to block DTrace access would be futile? Why did they do it? It seems like it must have been just a sort of due-diligence so that when the labels say, "Your DRM was a farce!", they can say, "Not at all; we even tried to block the cracking tools, but those damn kids...". So thanks for the wink, Apple:)
I've known about naked ladies for years, but that never stopped me from masturbating. Why should slashdotters overlook a perfectly good patent circle-jerk?
More frightening, I think, is that a botnet operator could simulate an attack from a foreign country, and thus manipulate the geopolitical climate. Imagine that the USA and Russia were on shaky terms after some kind of conflict... a malicious botnet operator could summon computers known to be within certain regions of Russia (or even select for those behind military/state IPs) and then target them on US defense networks. The US might then be forced to step into military action, assuming that they were under some kind of Russian electronic attack, when in reality they were being manipulated by rogue hackers.
There are much more efficient ways to use silicon than building microprocessors... say, a 1-million-neuron mixed-mode simulator that can be chained to take real-time input from an artificial retina or other neural input. From the site: "When it is completed in 2008, Neurogrid will emulate a million neurons in the cortex in real-time, rivaling the performance of two-hundred Blue Gene racks - at under a thousandth the cost."
Couple that cost reduction with power consumption orders of magnitude lower than other solutions, and you've got some serious potential.
Slashdot Mirror
Every sale you make, will generate less profit. Everything you buy will be more expensive.
Short rebuttal:
Every trade you make will likely execute faster, because an HFT was willing to take the other side. You may miss out on price improvement, but you will be able to dispose of your position risk faster, because the HFT is accepting that risk in the hopes of turning a profit.
Elaboration:
Any serious investor who does not want to immediately lose his or her shirt should be using limit orders. For example, I might want to sell 100 shares of AAPL at $398.00. I don't care who takes the other side; I just make an open contract to sell AAPL at that given price, and some anonymous market participant accepts that contract. In this case, the value that an HFT offers me is the liquidity (yes, I said it), whereby my order to buy those shares might be crossed nearly immediately, even though it was a resting offer (i.e. it did not cross any existing buy order in the marketplace). As an investor, I am able to sell quickly at the price I want.
The HFT will then try to sell those shares they've bought from me at a higher price. So - what has the HFT done to deserve said profit? They've taken on risk. I was able to sell my shares at $398.00 like I wanted, and now the HFT is stuck managing the position that I no longer wanted to hold. They're now long 100 shares of AAPL at $398.00, and while they're betting that they can sell them to somebody else at $398.01 or $398.05, it's also quite possible that AAPL will decline to $397.50 over the next few minutes, in which case the HFT will likely have booked the loss at $397.9x and moved on to their next trade.
In this case, the HFT is acting as a market-maker, which is a function that traders at financial firms have provided since markets have existed. What's the difference between today's HFT and yesterday's phone brokers? They do it faster; and they don't typically get the huge commission breaks or shoulder the liquidity obligations of traditional market-makers.
Another typical role an HFT plays is that of an arbitrageur. Arbitrage is buying and selling a set of instruments that results in an immediate profit with little risk; the only major risk involved is execution risk - that someone would beat the arbitrageur to the prices he saw in the market. Again, this might seem a useless activity, sucking up pennies by getting information faster. But consider a simple example: two futures exchanges, one in the US (the CME) and one in Europe (the ICE), both list heating oil. I, a hotel owner, want to hedge my building's exposure to heating oil price changes, so I submit a limit order to buy 10 heating oil futures (delivering contracts at the CME at $3.0000/gallon. I can only afford to pay for access to the CME, but an arbitrageur has access to both CME and ICE. The arbitrageur sees my order to buy 10 contracts at $3.0000/gallon on CME, but also sees an order to sell 30 contracts at $2.9999/gallon on ICE. He decides to sell me 10 contracts at $3.0000 and buy 10 of the 30 available contracts on ICE at $2.9999, locking in a whopping $42 profit.
So what value did the HFT provide to the market? He created an effective liquidity channel between the two disparate exchanges. And what specific value did he provide to me, the business owner? He gave me access to liquidity on an exchange that I could not afford to access. In a sense, I paid him $42 to do this. If I could afford to do it more cheaply myself, I would have. In this sense, he actually provides this liquidity channel for cheaper than I could have achieved otherwise. And what risk did he take? He took the risk that one of his orders did not execute against the market price he saw. Imagine that he is US-based as well, and sold me those ten contracts at $3.0000, but someone in Europe happened to buy those 30 c
We're in huge trouble as a country because a completely different sector of the financial industry was irresponsible in the way they lent money. Making high-frequency trading the scapegoat is not going to solve our problems.
As for high-frequency trading itself, I don't see the cause for disgust. Traders of all kinds (that is, people who exchange things with willing participants) try to optimize their revenue, as do most for-profit businesses. If your argument is that for-profit activities in general are the reason our country is in trouble, then I suppose I won't convince you of anything. If your argument is instead that doing business faster than others is immoral, I'd like to see a little more of the rationale.
The fun part is virtualization. In virtualization, you buy four rooms and call them an office, but it's a magical office, where the building managers can choose to swap out the rooms, plumbing, and electricity at any time, but you can't tell because they paint it all to look exactly the same. Creepy, huh?
We use SSH tunnels all the time at work to hop from server to server on different subnets. Any clever college student could figure it out, and the teacher would be none the wiser, unless he had packet sniffers on the network.
If the companies did in fact go along with the President's orders because there was money in it, can we fight back the same way? If money trumps the rule of law, a boycott should be organized to switch, en masse, to providers that refused to perform warrantless wiretapping. Does such a boycott exist?
Fuel for car: water
Source of water: Jesus Christ
Quite simple, really.
This is nitpicking: the car doesn't actually use water as fuel; it uses hydrogen. The hydrogen is simply generated by splitting water. For the company to claim that the car uses water as fuel, they'd have to actually be burning water somehow. Instead, water is the precursor to the fuel, and the byproduct of the burning.
For example, the current equivalent would be to claim that cars run on carbon dioxide, when in fact the fuel for the car was originally synthesized (by photosynthesis and subsequently by kerogen pyrolysis) from carbon dioxide, and produces carbon dioxide when burned.
RIP OiNK :(
I have a few close personal friends who do make a living off playing music, but it always becomes fairly hectic... you always have to be gigging to stay afloat. The thing is, most musicians who are not famous and touring end up doing a lot of teaching, which usually pays quite well, depending on the community. Sure, that's sort of an office job, but it's not quite the same as an IT guy or paper pusher.
Along with many others, I am a firm supporter of using records as advertisements for live shows. That said, it does require a good deal of money to record, produce, manufacture, and distribute an album. Happily, that's where the internet can come in doubly handy: it obviates manufacture and enables near-costless distribution (via P2P).
To be honest, I think that a lot of the record industry's problems could be solved if they improved the quality and lowered the cost of online music. Many people (myself included) pirate music from time to time because it's a) relatively easily available, and b) free. If there were a legitimized version of MP3Sparks charging the same prices, I think the record companies would see a lot more online sales. I am loathe to spend $12 on a new CD, especially in crappy 128 or 160kbps MP3 format, but give me 256k or lossless for $5 per CD and I'd start buying up a whole collection. Make it part of a social network community with easy music suggestion and you've got a goldmine.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah Nerd effect. :P
Graphic designers may only compose 0.5% of the general population, but they compose an order (or two) of magnitude more of the real population of interest here: serious Photoshop users.
I love The GIMP and have used it in lieu of Photoshop for many years, but for all its great features, it still can't compete on quite the same level as Phototshop for professional graphic designers.
Clever, but I think you mean "who has Mozilla's petard ready for their own hoisting?"
This mission actually cares a lot more about the ice underneath the rover. If thrusters did remove some of the material covering that ice layer, that would only make the digging step easier.
The beauty of the internet is that you can have both sites, and the end user can choose the one they prefer.
A file-sharing parallel would have been TPB vs. OiNK. Both serve a similar purpose, but one is more heavily moderated by the community. It is then up to the individual to choose which model best fits their needs.
And please, no vegan rants - England looked at a random sampling of 1000 people who reached the age of 100, and only 4 were vegetarians, all the rest ate meat routinely.
To be fair, such a statistic tells us very little about the relative health benefits of those eating habits. A more appropriate statistic would quote the percentage of meat-eaters who make it to 100 versus the percentage of vegetarians who make it to 100. There are of course confounding factors - vegetarians might be more health-conscious in general - but at least we'd actually be measuring the same variable in two separate groups, rather than simply counting the number of vegetarians per 1000 people of a certain age.
Indeed. It would be very interesting to see whether this technology could be used to disrupt hippocampal memory formation. Sort of a short-term version of that MIB flasher...
er, Joseph Smith? I don't think South Park had anything against the Wealth of Nations...
While I respect your high level of experience in the field, I disagree with the multicore prognosis you suggest.
Throughout history, especially in the computing industry, experts have incorrectly come to the consensus that the next step in technology is unnecessary. I think that Intel is banking on experts like yourself being again shortsighted. In the past, we've seen software expand to saturate the capabilities of almost every device on the market.
If they build it, software (and demand) will come.
No "Diggity!". You gotsta bag it up.
"I have modern microcontrollers in my parts box with 64 *bytes* of RAM and 1kbyte of flash (Atmel ATtiny13)"
Indeed. I am a senior in Biomedical Engineering (Electronic Instrumentation focus) at a major US university, and assembly language was a required component of my curriculum. It turns out to have come very much in handy: I am currently working on a project using a TI MSP430 with 128B RAM and 2kB flash in conjunction with a sensor to detect apnea in premature infants. Because the processor specs are so miniscule, not only does the processor cost less than $1, but it also runs at only 220 microamps. This can give us a battery life of roughly 3 months on a watch battery. The entire application logic and signal processing algorithm will be coded in assembly.
There's a significant difference between obsolete and esoteric.
I did not investigate the work required to restore DTrace functionality on Apple systems, but it seems like it was not impossibly difficult. Wouldn't Apple engineers figure that their attempts to block DTrace access would be futile? Why did they do it? It seems like it must have been just a sort of due-diligence so that when the labels say, "Your DRM was a farce!", they can say, "Not at all; we even tried to block the cracking tools, but those damn kids...". So thanks for the wink, Apple :)
I am obtaining a patent for the iFoot, a novel device that will trip unsuspecting iPhools as they move to the head of the line.
I've known about naked ladies for years, but that never stopped me from masturbating. Why should slashdotters overlook a perfectly good patent circle-jerk?
More frightening, I think, is that a botnet operator could simulate an attack from a foreign country, and thus manipulate the geopolitical climate. Imagine that the USA and Russia were on shaky terms after some kind of conflict... a malicious botnet operator could summon computers known to be within certain regions of Russia (or even select for those behind military/state IPs) and then target them on US defense networks. The US might then be forced to step into military action, assuming that they were under some kind of Russian electronic attack, when in reality they were being manipulated by rogue hackers.
There are much more efficient ways to use silicon than building microprocessors... say, a 1-million-neuron mixed-mode simulator that can be chained to take real-time input from an artificial retina or other neural input. From the site: "When it is completed in 2008, Neurogrid will emulate a million neurons in the cortex in real-time, rivaling the performance of two-hundred Blue Gene racks - at under a thousandth the cost."
Couple that cost reduction with power consumption orders of magnitude lower than other solutions, and you've got some serious potential.