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Unless you're trading way more frequently than you need to be, the spread is hardly a big deal. If you are trading frequently, than the spread is an opportunit

Unless you're trading way more frequently than you need to be, the spread is hardly a big deal. If you are trading frequently, than the spread is an opportunity to make money. As someone who trades a lot, I like fat spreads. My advice to any retail investor though is just dollar cost average into an index fund as a function of your age and forget about it. If you are going to try to 'beat the market' (and worry bout things like transaction taxes and spreads) you will lose. When people talk about retail traders in this conversation, they are either totally clueless or working in the industry and just don't want to be taxed. Anyone who says a retail trader should be trading enough to worry about spreads is not your friend.

tptacek 11y ago
"Retail trading" here being a term capturing all trading done on behalf of normal people, including pension and mutual funds. So no, that argument very much does not carry.
- blazespin 11y ago
  High frequency traders front run the dumb money, err, pensions. Getting rid of HFT via a transaction tax will not hurt them. Also, pensions shouldn't be trading so much that these things will hurt them. As for mutual funds, again, you're better off with an index fund and just not looking at it until you retire. How anyone outside the industry can argue against a transaction tax is beyond me. You have no idea how much the market has been rigged to suck as much money as possible out of you. Wall Street does not generate wealth. Everything they make is a tax on those that do.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    If that's true, why doesn't Vanguard agree with you? They've said publicly more than once that they are benefiting from HFT activity. I'm a little concerned that we're not talking about the same thing, by the way. Should retail traders care about modern spreads? No. Modern spreads are tiny. But before electronic trading pushed out the crooked human market makers, they were not.
    - blazespin 11y ago
      They have 3.5 trillion in client funds invested. They'd be insane to say the market is rigged. edit to add: Thinking more about it, likely their more profitable accounts (ie, not their index funds) would be destroyed by a transaction tax and so they don't want to see it implemented. The salad days of just doing a simple honest index fund with 3% annual turnover are long over for Vanguard.

tptacek 11y ago

"Retail trading" here being a term capturing all trading done on behalf of normal people, including pension and mutual funds. So no, that argument very much does not carry.

blazespin 11y ago
High frequency traders front run the dumb money, err, pensions. Getting rid of HFT via a transaction tax will not hurt them. Also, pensions shouldn't be trading so much that these things will hurt them. As for mutual funds, again, you're better off with an index fund and just not looking at it until you retire. How anyone outside the industry can argue against a transaction tax is beyond me. You have no idea how much the market has been rigged to suck as much money as possible out of you. Wall Street does not generate wealth. Everything they make is a tax on those that do.
- tptacek 11y ago
  If that's true, why doesn't Vanguard agree with you? They've said publicly more than once that they are benefiting from HFT activity. I'm a little concerned that we're not talking about the same thing, by the way. Should retail traders care about modern spreads? No. Modern spreads are tiny. But before electronic trading pushed out the crooked human market makers, they were not.
  - blazespin 11y ago
    They have 3.5 trillion in client funds invested. They'd be insane to say the market is rigged. edit to add: Thinking more about it, likely their more profitable accounts (ie, not their index funds) would be destroyed by a transaction tax and so they don't want to see it implemented. The salad days of just doing a simple honest index fund with 3% annual turnover are long over for Vanguard.