> Anyone who isn't involved in HFT should be in favor of rules that slow down trades to human time scales
What are you basing this on?
I’m a former algorithmic market maker. Every plan to “slow down trades to human time scales” I’ve seen were trivially gameable. They were always proposed by a group of concerned citizens, and then jumped on by my bosses, because if the market is slowed down to pre-HFT speeds, Wall Street can make pre-HFT profits on risk-free trading again.
Do you think the internet would work better if we forcibly increased latency? If we did, if the argument were this would flatten the market and better let small websites compete with CDNs, do you think that would actually happen? Google and Cloudflare would say “oh well,” and disassemble their servers?
Our markets have structural problems. They are mostly solvable. HFT is none of them, which is why you keep hearing about it from folks who don’t want reform.
> "How does HFT provide social benefit to the world at large?"
It's explained multiple times in this very discussion. It's not our fault if you refuse to read them. But the most straightforward and obvious way is that it injects liquidity into the market, making it easier to sell when you need to liquidate. (It also reduces volatility overall, another good thing.)
> > the exchanges weren't established for the abstract sake of money, they were established to provide benefit to people.
Snort. The exchanges were established by wealthy people, for wealthy people, to engage in business with other wealthy people.
The NYSE was established in 1792. Is it your contention that anyone except the elites were buying and selling stocks in 1792? Let alone all the exchanges that pre-date the NYSE. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was set up in the 1600s specifically to facilitate the buying and selling of Dutch East India Company shares. Was Farmer Aardhuis buying shares? Or aristocrats and royalty?
I suspect the root argument is really against the efficacy of markets and capitalism as a useful system for humanity, in which case I say that is a fair debate. The benefits are hardly obvious today.
What are you basing this on?
I’m a former algorithmic market maker. Every plan to “slow down trades to human time scales” I’ve seen were trivially gameable. They were always proposed by a group of concerned citizens, and then jumped on by my bosses, because if the market is slowed down to pre-HFT speeds, Wall Street can make pre-HFT profits on risk-free trading again.
Do you think the internet would work better if we forcibly increased latency? If we did, if the argument were this would flatten the market and better let small websites compete with CDNs, do you think that would actually happen? Google and Cloudflare would say “oh well,” and disassemble their servers?
Our markets have structural problems. They are mostly solvable. HFT is none of them, which is why you keep hearing about it from folks who don’t want reform.