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Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

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Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#91

Post by m4rtink »

raviolo wrote: post #54
CraigJPerry wrote: post #38

Chicago to London one way is around 35ms over fibre but that could be down to 21ms over the air like this. That signal is only about 10-15khz wide[1] from that diagram. That’s not a whole lot of data transfer ability, measured in the low kbps range rather than mbps. Very low kbps when you add in error correction. We are moving out of / have left the solar minimum so the MUF is usually well above the 20 metre band eac…

One does not need a lot of bandwidth to trade successfully. In fact, a limited number of signals agreed upon ahead of time is enough. E.g. signal “A” could mean “buy 10 contracts”, signal “B” - “sell 100 contracts”, etc. And you can of course wrap 256 such signals into one byte. So transmitting a single byte at an opportune time let’s you control your trading on the other continent in a quite precise fashion. If you…

Something similar was used for landing the original Mars Rovers - not actual full data telemetry channel but just a very simple very low bandwidth signal that can be translated to symbols, each signifying an important phase of the landing being reached.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#92

Post by ska »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #89
ska wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once you have enough liquidity that the markets function (i.e. the stuff of actual value to people doesn't get jammed up) it seem the marginal utility of adding liquidity is near zero. Have I missed something?

capital deteriorates and becomes obsolete so executives are constantly maintaining and optimizing their businesses as they respond to market conditions. These trades are how the market chooses who is better and worse at this constant maintenance/optimization. unfortunately capital isn't something you can set up and allow to run indefinitely.

I see where you are going here, but it seems to be many orders off magnitude off in time relative to HFT.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#95

Post by syedkarim »

Gatsky wrote: post #65
allenrb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve spent some time working in electronic trading, and I agree with you. Not only is the compensation very comfortable, but it’s the most interesting work I’ve ever done. That’s a tough combination to resist. As a result, it attracts people who should be out there curing cancer, developing new technologies, researching fundamental sciences, and so forth. It’s something everyone around me has acknowledged at one poin…

This is more complicated than it seems. You are comparing a job (HFT) with a pursuit (science). The actual comparison is HFT with academia (the job part). Academia is a terrible job and getting worse over time. Academics have been talking about how the job is bad and getting worse for 100 years. There is a long list of problems. Working in science is also an exercise of joining a community where your peers seem willi…

>> Science is often inhumane in a sense, you can waste your life on the wrong idea, certainly many people have. You can also be right, but only proven so after you die.

I’m no scientist, but the above really resonated with me.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#96

Post by chordalkeyboard »

wrs wrote: post #90
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

capital deteriorates and becomes obsolete so executives are constantly maintaining and optimizing their businesses as they respond to market conditions. These trades are how the market chooses who is better and worse at this constant maintenance/optimization. unfortunately capital isn't something you can set up and allow to run indefinitely.

I’m pretty sure it can be allowed to run unattended for several milliseconds at least.

it can but this is "late" capitalism, we are at a point where capital that updated every year was outcompeted by capital that updated every quarter, which was outcompeted by capital that updated every month, and so on. Each time this happened there were efficiency gains that required everyone to keep up or go out of business, and the efficiency gains resulted in surpluses that were allocated somewhere in the economy. If we turned back the clock then these businesses would become less efficient and we would have to sink more resources into them to continue the same output.

Iterative optimization resulted in smaller and smaller (and more frequent) corrections.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#97

Post by chordalkeyboard »

ska wrote: post #92
chordalkeyboard wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

capital deteriorates and becomes obsolete so executives are constantly maintaining and optimizing their businesses as they respond to market conditions. These trades are how the market chooses who is better and worse at this constant maintenance/optimization. unfortunately capital isn't something you can set up and allow to run indefinitely.

I see where you are going here, but it seems to be many orders off magnitude off in time relative to HFT.

its highly counterintuitive to see the modern system in the same terms as the capital markets of last millennium. and I'm convinced the system isn't perfect, I'm sure there are things that should be changed. I'm merely suggesting that the market sped up as people learned to do market stuff faster, and that market stuff is ultimately a process of allocating capital resources.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#98

Post by cscurmudgeon »

morei wrote: post #52
bigredhdl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because something has benefit, doesn't mean the benefit outweighs the cost. Specifically we are talking about the opportunity cost of other valuable things these people could be creating. Obviously this can be difficult to measure.

That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art? After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable. If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.

One of my friends made this argument. He was working in ad tech.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#99

Post by jasonlingx »

tekkk wrote: post #72
morei wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a terribly strong argument. Should we ban making chocolate as well? Sports? Art? After all, these people could surely be creating something more valuable. If you want to make an argument based on opportunity cost, it generally should have specific alternatives and a viable cost metric. Without that, it's not an argument, just an opinion.

You're way off the mark with your examples. More appropriate ones would be military weapons, multi-level marketing, payday loan firms with ridiculous interest rates, scummy advertisement firms. You might not remember that in the Middle-Ages a large portion of intellectuals were spending most of their time debating religion such as is God really omnipotent and what a specific verse in Bible meant. Now sure you can arg…

> Maybe HFT is intellectually more interesting than day-trading but I don't believe it to be very gratifying at deeper level.

HFT is automated day-trading in a way, so 1 meta level more intellectually interesting I suppose.

Re: Intruder at the top of the 20 meter amateur band?

#100

Post by kortilla »

balthigor wrote: post #41
kortilla wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that HFTs are so willing to invest in speed even to achieve a tiny advantage over other HFTs kind of gives the game away. Re-pricing s&p500 futures offers in Chicago based on faster stock offer information from nyc is fine. It’s improving a market making strategy or taking offers that look like they will now be profitable. > And when people quite rightly observe that having a speed advantage over other tra…

> HFTs do not front run for fucks sake. It’s illegal ... This is objectively false. Cursing does not strengthen an argument. HFTs paid to jump the queue. It should be illegal but it is not. There are a number of low-latency strategies that are beneficial for price discovery such as index arbitrage or market-making (with requirements to stay in the market). A strategy that is not beneficial is to pay the exchange for…

First look is still not front running. Unless you are able to get your order in before other orders, it’s not front running. Get it?

Being the first to look at new orders is nice, but the orders are in the queue so there is no way to get in front of them.

Here is a link to help you: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/frontrunning.asp

It’s very well-defined in the industry and when you complain about something completely unrelated using that term it muddies the argument for the general public and makes you sound ignorant to the people involved with the industry (both regulators and private participants).

I cursed because it’s the same ignorant argument over and over spreading false information about how the market functions. Actual front running is illegal and companies would get shut down in a heart beat if they were doing it.

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