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Declawing Speed Traders Is Goal of Stock Market Revamp Proposal

• tutufan 13y ago
  With due apologies to Mencken, this sounds like market Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be making money. In truth, whenever read closely, the "problems" these proposals aim to solve invariably turn out to be nonsense. There is one truly good reason to put an end to the HFT arms race: it's absorbing the time and talents of some of the greatest minds of our generation. This isn't just true of HFT, though--it's a problem for finance in general. If we want these people doing science instead, though, we're going to have to pay them to do it. Currently we're not.
  • foobarqux 13y ago
    There is also massive expenditure into things that have little value. This is wealth destruction. The real issue is that time in the real world will stay continuous so high speed traders will still have an advantage across markets and from information updates that occur outside an individual exchange.
    • tutufan 13y ago
      So?
      • foobarqux 13y ago
        So the result may not be what you expect. It's very hard to identify all the unintended implications and it doesn't seem like proponents of this scheme (which I like in principle) have thought of any. How do you deal with instruments that trade on both a foreign and local exchange? Or instruments that are highly correlated, one of which trades in a continuous market?