7 ms·

What Business is Wall Street In?

94 points by peter123 16y ago

mixmax 16y ago
Cracker, not hacker, is what he means. Annoying mistake.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I dunno, it seems to be "hacking" in the relevant sense of figuring out how a formal or mechanical system works and finding clever things to do based on that understanding (of which "exploiting weaknesses for profit" is one, though not necessarily the most interesting one). People here discuss "hacking fitness" or "hacking productivity" or whatever, so I don't see why "hacking the markets" is any worse of an analogy.
  - mixmax 16y ago
    I see it more as breaking the system in order to gain a financial advantage on someone elses behalf - which would be akin to cracking. Your point is taken though.
  - mortenjorck 16y ago
    The context in which Cuban uses it, though, seems to presume that any hacker will use his findings for illicit personal gain rather than for the benefit of the community. Admittedly this is a bit pedantic, and I know the popular use of the term has come to imply black hat, but this is Hacker News!
  - ynniv 16y ago
    Hackers like to differentiate blackhat from normal hacking. The article uses "hack" in the blackhat manner: seeking to cause damage for personal gain, and not openly discussing the exploits found.
Dilpil 16y ago
Which is the wiser way to deal with hackers: Is it to enact hard to enforce ambiguous anti hacking laws, while at the same time individually patching each exploit with unrelated fixes? Or is it to step back and analyze why a system has so much hackable complexity, and seek to fix the overarching issues that create security vulnerabilities? I would much rather see fundamental suggestions about how to optimize the market for fairness from the ground up rather than patchwork fixes like the dollar a trade tax, or the 5 year tax break.
- daniel-cussen 16y ago
  My understanding is that game theory isn't there yet, so you can't do a first principles market approach. But one should still try to make things work better and more elegantly.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It's also hard to really "design" markets in an overarching way; they tend to be nothing but formalizations of and patchwork fixes to various existing practices. The stock market, for example, is a formalization of the paper-stock-trades market with an attempt at improving transparency and reducing fraud; the commodities exchange market is similar for commodities, with the additional goal of providing a clearance mechanism to get counterparty risk out of the picture; etc.
ajg1977 16y ago
One of the best articles that's been written about the issues with today's wall street.
lotharbot 16y ago
If Mark Cuban thinks the market is now all about exotic derivatives rather than buying stock in companies you believe in, he's listening to the wrong people. Commission-based brokers talk about exotic derivatives; Warren Buffet still talks about buy-and-hold. The biggest wins and losses in day trading will come from exotic derivatives simply by their nature: they're highly leveraged bets. Those firms that create the vehicles to make those bets aren't "hackers", they're "Vegas". You ask for a bet against the housing market or for cattle, they set up a structure to let you make that bet, and you play the odds -- and you might beat the other betters in the market over the short term, but it's the house (taking its percentage off the top) that always wins long term. Mark Cuban is right to be uncomfortable playing that game. Meanwhile, people like Warren Buffet continue to look for healthy companies that are underpriced and buy into them for the long term. Day-to-day the market might be driven by short-term bets, but over the course of 3 decades it's still driven by the fundamental health of companies. If anything, those who care about "the performance of specific companies and their returns" benefit from the fact that occasionally, as a result of day traders' bets, healthy companies' stocks get sold at bargain prices. If you try to play Vegas' game, you'll probably get burned. But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns.
- davidw 16y ago
  > But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns. Why? There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on. To me it just seems like you're going to be the 'greater fool', unless you really go at it more or less as a job, with the associated time commitments.
  - lotharbot 16y ago
    > There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on. If you're playing the short-term investment game, all of those things matter hugely. It's a zero-sum game. In order to make money at it, you have to have a better system than the rest of the people playing -- just like making money on sports betting. They don't matter nearly so much in the long term. Long-term investing isn't zero-sum; economies can grow, and your goal is to own a growing piece of the economy. There are oodles of people playing the long-term game, but the market is big enough that even I, with my relatively limited information, can make good solid investments. Consider this a corollary to "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". The market can offer irrational bargains to such a degree that even once those with better information have had their fill, there's some left over for people like me.
borism 16y ago
There will be another crash, because there are too many players looking for the trillion dollar score. They can’t all win, yet how many do you think wouldn’t risk everything, even what is not theirs, for that remote chance to score big ? Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn’t traders take the biggest risk possible ? well I'm sorry, but that also applies to VC/angel funded startups game nowadays, which Cuban participates in.
- thefahim 16y ago
  Very constructive.
- gruseom 16y ago
  I disagree. Angels and VCs make money by investing in people who build great companies. What do derivatives traders build?
  - arethuza 16y ago
    It could be argued that derivatives traders are simply satisfying a market requirement - what about the folks who buy these things not really understanding what it is they are getting into, even though they are investment "professionals".
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    Derivatives traders build ways for great companies to hedge risk. They also push the price of assets towards their correct value, allowing the price in the present to reflect information on the future.
    - gruseom 16y ago
      The trouble with this argument is that it is a reductio ad absurdum after the fiasco of the last few years. It's hard to hear something like "they also push the price of assets towards their correct value" with a straight face. Has it not become painfully clear that the financial system has come to dominate the economy to a greater extent than the value it provides? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYUGDPFinancialShare.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYUGDPFinancialShare.jpg And that this has been driven by the interests of those who profit personally from such a configuration, in opposition to the interests of society as a whole? http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/i.... I'd say those statements are hardly controversial to anyone without a vested interest in the status quo. I grant that "hedging risk" and that other standby, "ensuring liquidity", do have value, just not to justify the existing system. The liquidity argument in particular comes off as ironic in light of the fact that trillions of public dollars provided to the financial sector in the name of opening liquidity to the general economy did no such thing.
libber 16y ago
I would like to be shown I am wrong because it seems like an oversight but the answer to his main question is "the bond market" right?
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn’t traders take the biggest risk possible ? I'm glad I'm not the only one who somehow says and types the exact opposite to what I meant to say. Mark means there is a maximum amount of moral hazard -- the brokers have completely different interests than the principals. If there were zero moral hazard, that would be a good thing.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
xxzz 16y ago
"I have always thought I had a good handle on the market. Until recently." Guess what? That just means that the market has gotten more efficient so that you can't arbitrage it anymore. If you can't make money, that your problem. If the quants made the market so irrational then why aren't you profitable arbitraging it? All technologies improve the average case at the expense of making the worst case worse. Cars versus walking for example. Average case: get to where you are going faster, worst case: horrible accident. The question is not whether financial innovation introduces systemic risk but whether the benefits out-weigh the costs. The consensus amongst academic is that yes, this is the case.
- cakesy 16y ago
  He wasn't doing arbitrage. He was investing in companies in that he thought were going up in stock price. Clearly he was researching different companies, and finding ones that he thought would do well in the future, but most people hadn't noticed yet. Then he would buy into them, and wait for them to hit it big, then cash out. This is not arbitrage, this is straight out investing.
MLnick 16y ago
This article is at best inconsistent, at worst self-serving. Funny that Cuban wasn't complaining about traders when they were driving up tech stocks in the dot-com bubble that eventually helped him land his giant payout in Yahoo stock. Or the traders that took said Yahoo stock off of him when he wanted to divest himself (aka liquidity). Tax breaks for long-term investors? Well VC and PE firms are "long-term investors" and they already have a pretty sweet deal on carried interest. That didn't stop them from rampant speculation in the tech bubble, or buying companies at outrageous debt multiples in the credit bubble. Imagine how much more it would have gone on if they didn't have to factor tax into their return calculations? I bet Mark would love to get all his future speculative VC investment payouts tax free. I don't know of a major tax regime that doesn't treat short-term trading revenue as income as opposed to capital gains. Tax breaks for "real long-term investment"? Yes, it's called a 401k or pension plan. If you're really a long-term investor a 10% algo glitch (4% actual down day) shouldn't even register for you. You shouldn't even be looking at the market on more than an annual basis. "The market has changed over the last 3 years" and is driven by macro issues? Yes we've been through a severe global recession driven by the bursting of a global credit bubble. Of course macro issues have dominated and volatility has been extremely high. (The wider) Wall Street's business is not and never was purely raising capital for companies. In the 20s were market volumes way less than capital raised as a proportion? I doubt it, but even if so it sure didn't prevent the Great Crash. Why does government need to further incentivise capital raising, that already brings in some of the highest possible fees (on individual transactions) to investment banks of any "traditional" activity (equity and debt underwriting, M&A, market making), i.e. excluding principal business and super exotic trades. He also says that companies never go public anymore, yet global IPO volumes are the highest in a decade (http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2010-03-26/global-ipo-q1 http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2010-03-26/global-ipo-q1). The only point I really agree with is leverage - it fuels the growth of bubbles, and exacerbates their bursting (or causes it when taken away in some cases). Most of the major bubbles/crashes in the past 100 years were either caused by excessive leverage (credit bubble, LTCM, various debt and currency crises) or had leverage as a major feature in their bursting and the speed and volatility of the movements (dot-com, Great Crash, credit bubble). The possible exception to this is '87 (to a large extent computer-driven, arguably) although again leverage played a big role. Finally, the major, unforeseen crashes have typically come about due to opaque, illiquid and/or highly leveraged situations (AIG, LTCM, CDS on CDOs, day traders buying tech stocks on margin etc). High-frequency traders only trade in the most liquid instruments, so ironically they are the ones trading on exchange, transparently and with exchange-set collateral and trading rules. Certainly illegal activities such as real front-running should be stamped out. Possibly things like flash orders too. A level playing field should be ensured. But he should worry more about the stuff going on off exchange than in the public markets.
known 16y ago
Wall Street should give priority for investors over traders.

94 points by peter123 16y ago

mixmax 16y ago

Cracker, not hacker, is what he means. Annoying mistake.

_delirium 16y ago
I dunno, it seems to be "hacking" in the relevant sense of figuring out how a formal or mechanical system works and finding clever things to do based on that understanding (of which "exploiting weaknesses for profit" is one, though not necessarily the most interesting one). People here discuss "hacking fitness" or "hacking productivity" or whatever, so I don't see why "hacking the markets" is any worse of an analogy.
- mixmax 16y ago
  I see it more as breaking the system in order to gain a financial advantage on someone elses behalf - which would be akin to cracking. Your point is taken though.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  The context in which Cuban uses it, though, seems to presume that any hacker will use his findings for illicit personal gain rather than for the benefit of the community. Admittedly this is a bit pedantic, and I know the popular use of the term has come to imply black hat, but this is Hacker News!
- ynniv 16y ago
  Hackers like to differentiate blackhat from normal hacking. The article uses "hack" in the blackhat manner: seeking to cause damage for personal gain, and not openly discussing the exploits found.

Dilpil 16y ago

Which is the wiser way to deal with hackers: Is it to enact hard to enforce ambiguous anti hacking laws, while at the same time individually patching each exploit with unrelated fixes? Or is it to step back and analyze why a system has so much hackable complexity, and seek to fix the overarching issues that create security vulnerabilities? I would much rather see fundamental suggestions about how to optimize the market for fairness from the ground up rather than patchwork fixes like the dollar a trade tax, or the 5 year tax break.

daniel-cussen 16y ago
My understanding is that game theory isn't there yet, so you can't do a first principles market approach. But one should still try to make things work better and more elegantly.
- _delirium 16y ago
  It's also hard to really "design" markets in an overarching way; they tend to be nothing but formalizations of and patchwork fixes to various existing practices. The stock market, for example, is a formalization of the paper-stock-trades market with an attempt at improving transparency and reducing fraud; the commodities exchange market is similar for commodities, with the additional goal of providing a clearance mechanism to get counterparty risk out of the picture; etc.

ajg1977 16y ago

One of the best articles that's been written about the issues with today's wall street.

lotharbot 16y ago

If Mark Cuban thinks the market is now all about exotic derivatives rather than buying stock in companies you believe in, he's listening to the wrong people. Commission-based brokers talk about exotic derivatives; Warren Buffet still talks about buy-and-hold. The biggest wins and losses in day trading will come from exotic derivatives simply by their nature: they're highly leveraged bets. Those firms that create the vehicles to make those bets aren't "hackers", they're "Vegas". You ask for a bet against the housing market or for cattle, they set up a structure to let you make that bet, and you play the odds -- and you might beat the other betters in the market over the short term, but it's the house (taking its percentage off the top) that always wins long term. Mark Cuban is right to be uncomfortable playing that game. Meanwhile, people like Warren Buffet continue to look for healthy companies that are underpriced and buy into them for the long term. Day-to-day the market might be driven by short-term bets, but over the course of 3 decades it's still driven by the fundamental health of companies. If anything, those who care about "the performance of specific companies and their returns" benefit from the fact that occasionally, as a result of day traders' bets, healthy companies' stocks get sold at bargain prices. If you try to play Vegas' game, you'll probably get burned. But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns.

davidw 16y ago
> But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns. Why? There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on. To me it just seems like you're going to be the 'greater fool', unless you really go at it more or less as a job, with the associated time commitments.
- lotharbot 16y ago
  > There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on. If you're playing the short-term investment game, all of those things matter hugely. It's a zero-sum game. In order to make money at it, you have to have a better system than the rest of the people playing -- just like making money on sports betting. They don't matter nearly so much in the long term. Long-term investing isn't zero-sum; economies can grow, and your goal is to own a growing piece of the economy. There are oodles of people playing the long-term game, but the market is big enough that even I, with my relatively limited information, can make good solid investments. Consider this a corollary to "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". The market can offer irrational bargains to such a degree that even once those with better information have had their fill, there's some left over for people like me.

borism 16y ago

There will be another crash, because there are too many players looking for the trillion dollar score. They can’t all win, yet how many do you think wouldn’t risk everything, even what is not theirs, for that remote chance to score big ? Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn’t traders take the biggest risk possible ? well I'm sorry, but that also applies to VC/angel funded startups game nowadays, which Cuban participates in.

thefahim 16y ago
Very constructive.
gruseom 16y ago
I disagree. Angels and VCs make money by investing in people who build great companies. What do derivatives traders build?
- arethuza 16y ago
  It could be argued that derivatives traders are simply satisfying a market requirement - what about the folks who buy these things not really understanding what it is they are getting into, even though they are investment "professionals".
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Derivatives traders build ways for great companies to hedge risk. They also push the price of assets towards their correct value, allowing the price in the present to reflect information on the future.
  - gruseom 16y ago
    The trouble with this argument is that it is a reductio ad absurdum after the fiasco of the last few years. It's hard to hear something like "they also push the price of assets towards their correct value" with a straight face. Has it not become painfully clear that the financial system has come to dominate the economy to a greater extent than the value it provides? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYUGDPFinancialShare.jpg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NYUGDPFinancialShare.jpg And that this has been driven by the interests of those who profit personally from such a configuration, in opposition to the interests of society as a whole? http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/inside-job http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/405/i.... I'd say those statements are hardly controversial to anyone without a vested interest in the status quo. I grant that "hedging risk" and that other standby, "ensuring liquidity", do have value, just not to justify the existing system. The liquidity argument in particular comes off as ironic in light of the fact that trillions of public dollars provided to the financial sector in the name of opening liquidity to the general economy did no such thing.

libber 16y ago

I would like to be shown I am wrong because it seems like an oversight but the answer to his main question is "the bond market" right?

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn’t traders take the biggest risk possible ? I'm glad I'm not the only one who somehow says and types the exact opposite to what I meant to say. Mark means there is a maximum amount of moral hazard -- the brokers have completely different interests than the principals. If there were zero moral hazard, that would be a good thing.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

xxzz 16y ago

"I have always thought I had a good handle on the market. Until recently." Guess what? That just means that the market has gotten more efficient so that you can't arbitrage it anymore. If you can't make money, that your problem. If the quants made the market so irrational then why aren't you profitable arbitraging it? All technologies improve the average case at the expense of making the worst case worse. Cars versus walking for example. Average case: get to where you are going faster, worst case: horrible accident. The question is not whether financial innovation introduces systemic risk but whether the benefits out-weigh the costs. The consensus amongst academic is that yes, this is the case.

cakesy 16y ago
He wasn't doing arbitrage. He was investing in companies in that he thought were going up in stock price. Clearly he was researching different companies, and finding ones that he thought would do well in the future, but most people hadn't noticed yet. Then he would buy into them, and wait for them to hit it big, then cash out. This is not arbitrage, this is straight out investing.

MLnick 16y ago

This article is at best inconsistent, at worst self-serving. Funny that Cuban wasn't complaining about traders when they were driving up tech stocks in the dot-com bubble that eventually helped him land his giant payout in Yahoo stock. Or the traders that took said Yahoo stock off of him when he wanted to divest himself (aka liquidity). Tax breaks for long-term investors? Well VC and PE firms are "long-term investors" and they already have a pretty sweet deal on carried interest. That didn't stop them from rampant speculation in the tech bubble, or buying companies at outrageous debt multiples in the credit bubble. Imagine how much more it would have gone on if they didn't have to factor tax into their return calculations? I bet Mark would love to get all his future speculative VC investment payouts tax free. I don't know of a major tax regime that doesn't treat short-term trading revenue as income as opposed to capital gains. Tax breaks for "real long-term investment"? Yes, it's called a 401k or pension plan. If you're really a long-term investor a 10% algo glitch (4% actual down day) shouldn't even register for you. You shouldn't even be looking at the market on more than an annual basis. "The market has changed over the last 3 years" and is driven by macro issues? Yes we've been through a severe global recession driven by the bursting of a global credit bubble. Of course macro issues have dominated and volatility has been extremely high. (The wider) Wall Street's business is not and never was purely raising capital for companies. In the 20s were market volumes way less than capital raised as a proportion? I doubt it, but even if so it sure didn't prevent the Great Crash. Why does government need to further incentivise capital raising, that already brings in some of the highest possible fees (on individual transactions) to investment banks of any "traditional" activity (equity and debt underwriting, M&A, market making), i.e. excluding principal business and super exotic trades. He also says that companies never go public anymore, yet global IPO volumes are the highest in a decade (http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2010-03-26/global-ipo-q1 http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2010-03-26/global-ipo-q1). The only point I really agree with is leverage - it fuels the growth of bubbles, and exacerbates their bursting (or causes it when taken away in some cases). Most of the major bubbles/crashes in the past 100 years were either caused by excessive leverage (credit bubble, LTCM, various debt and currency crises) or had leverage as a major feature in their bursting and the speed and volatility of the movements (dot-com, Great Crash, credit bubble). The possible exception to this is '87 (to a large extent computer-driven, arguably) although again leverage played a big role. Finally, the major, unforeseen crashes have typically come about due to opaque, illiquid and/or highly leveraged situations (AIG, LTCM, CDS on CDOs, day traders buying tech stocks on margin etc). High-frequency traders only trade in the most liquid instruments, so ironically they are the ones trading on exchange, transparently and with exchange-set collateral and trading rules. Certainly illegal activities such as real front-running should be stamped out. Possibly things like flash orders too. A level playing field should be ensured. But he should worry more about the stuff going on off exchange than in the public markets.

known 16y ago

Wall Street should give priority for investors over traders.