Live data from Hacker News

The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

blog.ltse.com

521–530 of 561 posts

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope others see that our markets are designed. They are human artifacts. They are not natural laws to be accepted as-is. “Markets” are not the same thing as “the market”. Markets are human artifacts; the market is an emergent behavior. It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics. If the behavior of your markets fails to match the reality of the ma…

The way you've put this bears more resemblance to religion than anything else. "Markets" are real things. I can walk to them, or navigate to their website, or call them up. You are claiming that there is an invisible, metaphysical "the market", which exists in the Platonic world of forms, that governs the behavior of these genuine markets. This is like reading "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", and founding a relig…

>We're all free to speculate on the consequences those different rules will have

To echo what my sibling commenter said, those consequences are what the grandparent comment is referring to as the emergent market - because it's not possible to control or accurately predict the behavior of every single actor.

It was a rebuttal to a statement saying we don't need to consider markets as pure forces of nature, because how we set them up can affect the outcome. I think everyone in this conversation agrees that it's both true that the design of a market affects how people act in it, as well as it being impossible to predict or control perfectly. The question is to what extent it actually is possible.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#522
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today's announcement doesn't pertain to listings, so 1) is a ways off still You can do 2) through your existing broker, so long as they are a member of the LTSE, which they likely already are. You can check their membership status here: https://brokercheck.finra.org/

I am a broker and software engineer and am just now hearing of the LTSE. Is there a test or way to register through FINRA? Would be interested in taking part in this in both capacities.

Trading has to happen via a broker that is a member of the exchange (as is true for every other exchange). If you are part of a firm that would like to become a member, the information is here: https://longtermstockexchange.com/market/connectivity/

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#523
There is no need for a long-term stock exchange.

If you want to encourage long-term investing, "all you need to do" is change investment taxation.

Equities held for less than a minute? 100% tax. A year? 20%, like the US today. Five or ten years? Zero.

Boom, HFT gone, and a sudden rise in long-term investing.

But the devil's in the details, in this case the length and shape of the curve.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#525

Let me try to summarize everyone’s same question: - The idea of a stock exchange that allows companies and investors to focus on 5, 10, 25 year horizons sounds great! - However companies on normal stock exchanges now already try to do this, but it’s hard because of quarterly earnings, pressure for quarterly growth, etc - How is LTSE different? Seems like: Companies and investors “promise” to have a longer term focus…

I used to be part of the system that built machines that auto traded on arbitrage opportunities due to millsec/nanosec differences in reported prices in different exchanges. Although probably not popular I would suggest that long term stocks needs to incorporate features that actively block certain trading patterns: limit price changes, limit buy/ sell frequency, & disallow shorting. I have been heavily involved in t…

> That is, if I were an automated machine trader, I would add LTSE and their slow price changes and compare them to NYSE and make zillions.

Limiting trading frequency, limiting order types, and disallowing shorting would create even better opportunities for automated trading than what LTSE would provide.

> Shorting is never a long-term game and should be banned, as it never does the company any favours.

The economy benefits when market prices more accurately reflect relative value between assets. Hampering the ability of the market to lower a price that is too high never does the economy any favors. More specifically, it harms investors who buy the overpriced stock and it harms other companies raising capital who merit a higher relative price.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#526

This short-term-pervades-the-market is based on the idea that the current stockholders are able to trick future stockholders into buying stocks that have eaten their seed corn, before those future stockholders realize this. How can this process of continually tricking the next investor possibly work out quarter after quarter? Wouldn't the stock market have tanked long ago if this was, in fact, underlying the bulk of…

If short term investing wasn’t valuable why would real estate closest to the stock exchange be priced higher simply because it enables HFT to shave milliseconds of execution time?

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#527
post #257

What is your view on the whole Derivatives issue? Because they seem to be very problematic as it seems that a small part of it is really used for useful business objectives (like hedging) but the vast majority of them is used as plain, bubble generating, gambling in the markets (as the subprime chaos in 2008). Will LTSE address this issue in any way?

Yes, but I don't have anything to announce at this time.

Good. Now I'm curious.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope others see that our markets are designed. They are human artifacts. They are not natural laws to be accepted as-is. “Markets” are not the same thing as “the market”. Markets are human artifacts; the market is an emergent behavior. It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics. If the behavior of your markets fails to match the reality of the ma…

> It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics. It's funny you make this comparison. Because so many of these supposed laws about "the market" violate an effective equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics for information systems: P=/=NP. The claims often made about the transcendent nature of the laws governing "the market" violate the computation…

>an effective equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics for information systems: P=/=NP.

This is not true. For example, the second law is only a statistical claim - the larger the system, the more likely it holds. But the second law is not a law against entropy ever going the other way. It's entirely possible, but not likely that another universe pops out of a quantum fluctuation at any moment. See the concept of a Boltzmann Brain for where physicists think this leads.

And P != NP is not a law at all - it's a guess, since no one knows if it's true. Complexity classes certainly changed with the introduction of quantum computer, allowing (very) few problems with known exponential classical Turing time to be done in polynomial quantum Turing time. It is also known that if closed timelike loops are allowed in computation then P=NP, but it's not known if we can engineer such physical items.

>The claims often made about the transcendent nature of the laws governing "the market" violate the computational properties of reality as we understand it

As evidence of the falsity of the above claims, TQFTs routinely compute NP hard problems, which is why for some time Friedman has tried to leverage them to solve NP hard computational problems.

Here's [1] but one paper showing this to be true. "Non-Abelian topological quantum field theories exhibit the mathematical features necessary to support a model capable of solving all ⧣P problems, a computationally intractable class, in polynomial time. "

Roughly, TQFTs perform certain "computations" on knots in polynomial time that are known to be NP hard in classical or current quantum computing models.

[2] is another nice take in Annals of Mathematics, the most prestigious journal in math.

Thus reality routinely solves NP hard problems. Thus your claims are not true.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/95/1/98 [2] https://annals.math.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/annals-...

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#529
post #460
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eric, I saw you present at Twiistup years ago with that CEO guy from Demand Media, where you exclaimed that you crammed untested spyware toolbars into IMVU just to get money, knowing it would blow up your users' computers. It's clear you got some money since then, but other than that why would we trust you with a stock exchange in retrospect? Were you hoping we would forget?

There are not enough upvotes for this comment.

Eric, I see you've commented hours after my question was posted, but neglected to answer? You openly admitted to infecting IMVU users' computers with malicious toolbars on purpose to make quick, easy money at Twiistup in a speech on startups, and now you are asking us to buy stocks on your exchange? You're not even mentioning that SEC REGSHO applies to ANY US stock exchange, so all the brokers have to do is let certain clients borrow and that's the end of the "long term" regardless of your marketing of this. I guess you were a notch better than your Twiistup co-presenter Robert Scoble?: https://www.google.com/search?q=robert+scoble+harassment So reply Eric, tell us why you have become so trustworthy? Is it that you cajoled people into getting you truckloads of cash? Of course it is.

Re: The Long-Term Stock Exchange Opens for Business

#530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope others see that our markets are designed. They are human artifacts. They are not natural laws to be accepted as-is. “Markets” are not the same thing as “the market”. Markets are human artifacts; the market is an emergent behavior. It’s governed by laws beyond our control as surely as the behavior of materials are governed by thermodynamics. If the behavior of your markets fails to match the reality of the ma…

The way you've put this bears more resemblance to religion than anything else. "Markets" are real things. I can walk to them, or navigate to their website, or call them up. You are claiming that there is an invisible, metaphysical "the market", which exists in the Platonic world of forms, that governs the behavior of these genuine markets. This is like reading "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", and founding a relig…

If you think emergent behaviors are "invisible" and "metaphysical", this suggests a modeling deficiency on your part rather than anything interesting about the real world.

> This "the market" you refer to is an abstraction of the behavior of real markets

The market isn't an abstraction at all - it's a handle for the emergent behavior of the sum total of all economic activity.

Post reply on HN