> One might argue that securities trading is not a representative social space, because it is so quantitative, because it is so close to (indeed identical with)

> One might argue that securities trading is not a representative social space, because it is so quantitative, because it is so close to (indeed identical with) the movements of pure capital, because it has available to it the most powerful computers and most expert computer technicians money can buy HAHAHA! Only in finance do people perceive the incumbents as the future winners. I mean in tech, we mock those with more money, more capital, because we know that no body lasts - everyone is disrupted, and so it goes. It's kind of like government conspiracy stuff, where people think that the government is too incompetent to handle most things, and yet simultaneously believe that somehow they can pull off insanely complex conspiracies. It's like religious people in airplanes - nothing funnier. You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you knew how stupid a lot of finance guys were - you'd laugh at statements like this all day long. "Oh no they are bigger than us! Oh no they have better computers! Oh no PhDs!". HFT is merely a matchmaker. The thing you really have to worry about is irrational capital flow to non-useful assets. 87/97/00/07 -> All of them had essentially nothing to do with tech - they just ran on tech (correlation != causation). It was the idiotic capital allocation by humans that really fucks things up. Buying Russian/Asian bonds cheap, thinking nothing will go wrong was stupid. Buying companies with no earnings was stupid. Building houses in the desert of Arizona is stupid. Tulip buying is stupid - and that's what all of these "crises" are about - people fucked up - they bought things high, and didn't look carefully until the market fell apart. All problems in financial markets are not driven by black swans. They are driven by slow moving asteroids - anyone can see miles off if they looked at it critically. Forward looking: Silicon Valley is moving towards a bubble. Gov bonds are in a bubble. Money Markets are in a bubble. Equity is cheap. High risk bonds are cheap.