71–80 of 187 posts
I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see the whole HFT industry be deleted. What a waste of human intellect.
Arbitrage is good actually. Tigher spreads make transactions cheaper and safer for the smaller players.
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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.
Now sure you can argue that they were doing only what the society and themselves considered valuable. But one can only wonder if those smart people had been putting their best effort into other things, say developing agriculture or better industrial processes.
I myself did a little day-trading at one period in my life and while I made money, I thought it was the most useless thing I could spend my life in. I was just creating money out of thin air doing basically nothing. Maybe HFT is intellectually more interesting than day-trading but I don't believe it to be very gratifying at deeper level. Perhaps it requires a certain type of person to enjoy that kind of pursuit. I'm definitely not one of those.
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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.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between chocolate & HFT. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
Why suspect HFTs over other potential interfering applications? Could be anything, and unless I missed something, TFA doesn't show any evidence that the usage is HFT-motivated
It is not proof of course. Plenty of other things could be happening in Chicago.
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There aren't a lot of advantages to VHF/UHF over the direct microwave links that they're already using (and a handful of disadvantages), so it's probably not likely. The big perceived advantage to HF is eliminating all of the hops, despite the dramatically reduced bandwidth. With VHF/UHF, you'd still need the hops, but you also have reduced bandwidth. If you need to hop, might as well make use of the bandwidth that y…
I believe you missed the joke here...
I did miss the joke. An upvote to both of you.
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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…
Taking it from less skilled traders, actually.
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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…
Right. And through all that thinking about silly stuff, people eventually came to the idea that a LOT of this religion stuff is silly and not worth wasting time on, so smart people could skip worrying about it for the rest of human existence if they chose to. (Whereas beforehand, it was considered a super-important thing to think about).
You seem to imply all this effort was a waste but ultimately it led to the Reformation, various Renaissance periods and, most importantly, Douglas Adams.
I suspect that the same thing will happen with HFT. Either people will stop bothering with it eventually, or they will discover some fantastic new quantum effects that pay dividends for humanity forever more. :)
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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…
Most systems are pretty inefficient and the problem is at the time we do not know which pursuits will yield the most valuable results.
Top-down, authoritarian direction of intellectual pursuit tends to yield worse outcomes than just letting people do as they wish. It's dangerous to suggest that any single perspective can accurately decide value.
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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…
Yep. Some of the brightest minds in the world, including many of my friends, are wasted figuring out how to make more money from online clicks.
If we want more people in the sciences, we've got to create the jobs.
I think the source is rather an unintentional radiator in this case.