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Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

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Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#301
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The upshot of this argument is that this is valuable activity. We need markets to price tradable assets and provide liquidity. The counterargument is that there are diminishing and/or negative returns to increased liquidity and velocity. Take just stocks. Liquidity is not a problem. You have liquidity whether trades take minutes or milliseconds. Pricing? I'd say we have pricing covered too, at least the pricing that…

My view is that current liquidity and pricing are far from perfect, particularly when it matters most (e.g. a market panic) and particularly in the global context of the vast universe of interrelated instruments that need better relative pricing. Given that we benefit from realtime pricing, milliseconds matter when you must determine a large vector of prices with complex dependencies using the ensemble recursive syst…

> My view is that current liquidity and pricing are far from perfect, particularly when it matters most (e.g. a market panic)

And in a market panic, your friendly HFT shop next door is there and offering to buy and sell to stabilise the price?

> Given that we benefit from realtime pricing

Yeah, if you assume the conclusion that we benefit from it, then we do. But have you shown this?

In which market do we benefit from milliseconds pricing, compared to, say, an auction every minute?

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because having homeless people lining our streets on our commutes to/from our jobs is a daily reminder that if we don't work hard enough to increase corporate profits, then our bosses might lay us off and we'll end up like them. That or moral apathy. At some point in the 80s we decided that markets driven by business profits should dictate every aspect of society. I imagine 100 years from now they'll look back at tod…

100 years after Communism burst on the scene, we currently look at that development with disgust. Right now most people have access to abundant food, cellphone in every pocket, access to a wealth of information, access to transportation, incredible medical advances. I can't imagine that the progress we've made would be scorned. Like other market driven forces, bad players will not be rewarded as information about the…

You are right that the world has gotten immensely better in recent decades, pulling hundreds of millions out of poverty.

If you compare real median wage growth in the West in the 60s and 70s with the last two decades though, it doesn't look so great. Maybe we can do better.

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#303
post #110

Markets around the world are determining prices on a massive variety of instruments that derive value from the current and future value of products such as currencies, interest rates, equities, grains, livestock, metals, oil, gasoline, natural gas, and electricity. These prices allow us to prioritize resources, make fair transactions, and manage risk (i.e. buy insurance on the value of critical products so that we ca…

>> The markets are kind of like a massive, distributed, realtime, ensemble, recursive predictor that performs much better than any one of its individual component algorithms could. That's really interesting, I never thought of it that way. >> markets work by polling the expertise of many different parties who all understand a piece of how things should be valued. Does the whole picture ever become apparent to all of…

That argument is basically Hayek's (and Mises's) answer to the economic calculation problem. Hayek argued (in "The Use of Knowledge in Society") that free markets are better than centralised planning, because of dispersed knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek#The_economic_c...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#304
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody has the whole picture, how can we be sure if it's beneficial? edit: Or asked differently: What do we have now with high frequency trade established compared to the situation before?

It's enormously cheaper to do business on markets nowadays. Back in the old days, spreads were sometimes multiple dollars on human-made markets with a lot of inventory. With HFT, people compete to offer the best market, and spreads are in the pennies.

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Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a perfect market, there would be no economic profit. Your entire comment is very interesting; sorry for the short response!

No worries at all. I know it's an extremely long comment on a comment on an article - thanks for reading it. On further thought, the conjecture's behavioural outcome is actually not quite so analogous to 'salami slicing' as it is analogous to monetary policy caused inflation. In effect, the amplification effect would serve to create profit by creating an apparent valuable trade where none actually exists - such trade…

I don't know, I see many problems with this comment (akin to the writing of postmodern continental philosophers). Maybe you can restate your conjecture again?

> In effect, the amplification effect would serve to create profit by creating an apparent valuable trade where none actually exists - such trades essentially print money.

Trading is a zero sum game (notwithstanding the allocative function enabled by proper price signals), so I don't see how it would engender inflation.

> the new behaviour of central banks having to cut their interest rates to near or at zero to compensate for this asymmetric inflation

There are many theories about the persistent low rates ("secular stagnation") etc., but I've _never_ heard that particular problem linked to HFT.

> I conjecture that, by ever increasing the sampling rate and the speed at which transactions complete, markets are not being made more efficient.

That's fairly clear, and I can agree with that.

> Instead, I hypothesise that, as markets directly effect the price of the instrument reflexively, the feedback latency produced creates relative local pockets of perceived value - which are only profitable trades in relation to local information asymmetry.

What?

> As the vast majority of high-speed trading holds market positions on extremely short time scales, shifting exposure constantly, this profit is immediately realised locally resulting in the gradual diffuision of this inefficiency as the increase in price of all instruments.

Not sure what you're saying there, but of course the idea is that traders with superior information can realise trading profits, and via such trading, information spreads through the market, until no such trading opportunities persist. However, HFT does not necessarily follow this kind of Hayekian vision, but is maybe more insightfully analysed in a game-theoretic framework.

> This is a direct result of the cost of trading being factored directly into the agent's local acceptable sale price of held instruments. Every local agent trading action is ideal, but the global market is a divergently inefficient one.

> Indeed, it is a market in which its pricing inefficiency is maximally concealed from all market participants.

What?

> In a sense, I conjecture that the estimator is not functioning to increase market efficiency ...

Possibly, yes.

> ... but is, instead amplifying local inefficiency globally, in effect, much like a charge pump would operate in a voltage multiplier circuit.

How is it amplifying it? Yes, we have seen flash crashes, sure, resulting in some transfer of wealth. But this does not explain or predict inflation, geometrically accelerating market activity, nucleated false-vacuum collapse, or any such things.

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This system is the only one unbiased estimator / decision maker humans ever found. Though it has quite high variance, in the long-term its results are just astounding

If it's unbiased, that's the same as saying it's random? If it leads towards efficiency, productivity, most beneficial allocation, as suggested, those are all biases.

> If it's unbiased, that's the same as saying it's random?

No, its deviations from the true value are essentially random.

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#307

...actually it doesn't sound to me like this article is about HFT-based prop trading at all (prop trading would mean Goldman Sachs taking positions onto their own books), but about the business unit called GSAT (Goldman Sachs algorithmic trading) who execute trades on behalf of clients, so never taking any positions onto their own books. The traditional market model used to be that at every point in time, a market ma…

Yes. Many people use "algorithmic trading" as a synonym for "automated trading" or even HFT, when it is used (in the industry) basically for "optimal execution, computer aided, of a client order".

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#308
post #54
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about price discovery is pointless? Would you prefer that prices update only once a day? Once a week? Once a month? Realtime pricing of securities and derivatives is critical for an efficiently functioning economy. Pretty much everything at sub-second resolution is pointless. I'd like to hear a coherent argument how realtime or even sub-second pricing of securities and derivatives is critical for an efficientl…

> Pretty much everything at sub-second resolution is pointless. Should your credit card network only allow transactions once a minute? Price data comes from transactions (trades) as they occur. There’s more utility derived from a market where people can transact on demand. > yet the largest markets in the world are closed 2/3rd of the day Not correct. Equity markets are far from the largest in the world, yet it’s pos…

Sorry, conflating frequency of price discovery for efficient investment allocation with payments (as you here) or with internet speed or aircraft control systems (as someone else above) is really disingenuous.

Being closed on weekends is just fine for the market (unlike credit cards, the internet, or aircraft control systems).

Re: Goldman Sachs is spending $100M to shave milliseconds off stock trades

#310
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No worries at all. I know it's an extremely long comment on a comment on an article - thanks for reading it. On further thought, the conjecture's behavioural outcome is actually not quite so analogous to 'salami slicing' as it is analogous to monetary policy caused inflation. In effect, the amplification effect would serve to create profit by creating an apparent valuable trade where none actually exists - such trade…

I don't know, I see many problems with this comment (akin to the writing of postmodern continental philosophers). Maybe you can restate your conjecture again? > In effect, the amplification effect would serve to create profit by creating an apparent valuable trade where none actually exists - such trades essentially print money. Trading is a zero sum game (notwithstanding the allocative function enabled by proper pri…

All excellent points and questions. I'll consider appropriate answers and restatements and respond soon. I'm rarely satisfied with my ability to communicate ideas like these. I really must express this conjecture formally - in the language of mathematics - so that it may be unambiguously communicated in the appropriate contexts.
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