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People have to have different information or views on a market, otherwise no trade would take place except between gamblers. HFTs have no unfair advantage. Eve
by hft_throwaway 13y ago
People have to have different information or views on a market, otherwise no trade would take place except between gamblers.
HFTs have no unfair advantage. Everything that they use is available publicly for a cost. It's like saying running a retail store in New York is unfair because rents are high.
Is it wrong that some hedge funds or mutual funds are able to build a superior valuation of a stock through hiring more researchers? What about guys counting cars going into walmart parking lots? Everyone can do those things, but most opt not to and are at a disadvantage.
- 001sky 13y agoPeople have to have different information or views on a market, otherwise no trade would take place except between gamblers. This is wrong. The house is not a gambler.
- wavesounds 13y agoYou could pay Bill Gates a lot of money to wear a wire for you and perhaps if the number was high enough he would do it and you could then argue that anyone could have paid Bill Gates to wear a wire and therefore everything the wire records could be public knowledge you can use to trade MSFT on. But that's illegal and we've all agreed it's illegal and its basically no different then front running in HFT.
- djoldman 13y agoEveryone in this story has the same information or rather the same access to information. Anyone with know-how and the money to colocate servers at matching engine data centers has access to the same information. Aka every pension fund, insurance fund, mutual fund, wall st. bank (including Royal Bank of Canada, RBC), and prop-shop. If your definition of HFT is "people/firms who have access to more information on stocks than others" then HFT doesn't exist; notwithstanding illegal insider trading on private information, which isn't what this blog post describes.