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Traders in general dont proved any service to the market except liquidity, so I never pay attention the old guard whine about HFT stealing their profit. Market

Traders in general dont proved any service to the market except liquidity, so I never pay attention the old guard whine about HFT stealing their profit. Markets don't owe traders anything. A futures commodity market (very highly traded) really exists so that companies can hedge risk. Its why Burger King can survive beef price jumps. They dont care about HFT, they just are happy that their orders get filled when they place them. So we have to tolerate someone providing liquidity in the market. And in order to do that we have to allow leveraging and margin trading so that its worth it for those traders. Old style trading, or anything that's not high frequency is too crude to make profits without making extremely leveraged bets and thats bad for the market in general. What happens when markets start to look unsettled and everyone is leveraged? Margins (amount on money needed to hold position) go up. Firms realize that they cant put down money for margins so they try to dump their positions. But everyone is doing that so the bottom falls out of the market and margins go up even higher. And this is caused by everyday hedgefunds on the SIP, since in order to be profitable with their rather crude tools they have to leverage more. So I'm not defending HFT, I just think that everyone wants to see them as the bad guy, but its not like traders themselves are heroes. We just need to see the problem as "who can provide liquidity and stability to a market" rather than "who has an unfair advantage"

oojgaoj 11y ago
> We just need to see the problem as "who can provide liquidity and stability to a market" rather than "who has an unfair advantage" And essentially every single analysis of THAT problem says that HFTs consume liquidity in times of instability, and "provide" liquidity in times of stability. As such, HFT destroys the value that people actually care about. Anyway... no point in arguing about this; the sociopathic assholes who run HFT aren't going to stop, the exchanges aren't going to fire their best customers, and the regulators are all bought and paid for. The only good news about HFT, at all, is that because it's a completely commoditized playing field, their margins tend to get compressed over time, so at least they're screwing us slightly less every year.

oojgaoj 11y ago

> We just need to see the problem as "who can provide liquidity and stability to a market" rather than "who has an unfair advantage" And essentially every single analysis of THAT problem says that HFTs consume liquidity in times of instability, and "provide" liquidity in times of stability. As such, HFT destroys the value that people actually care about. Anyway... no point in arguing about this; the sociopathic assholes who run HFT aren't going to stop, the exchanges aren't going to fire their best customers, and the regulators are all bought and paid for. The only good news about HFT, at all, is that because it's a completely commoditized playing field, their margins tend to get compressed over time, so at least they're screwing us slightly less every year.