malbec

justin88 Wrote:
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spierce Wrote:
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  Somehow the markets functioned well before HFT

This is abject nonsense. The markets have never
been perfect nor even well-behaved.

All of the recent innovation has been, for the
most part, an improvement for the retail investor.
Penny quotes, electronic brokerages, ETFs,
etc…

Perhaps you’re yearning for the day when there was
a $100 commission to trade IBM with a 25c spread?
you know what is abject nonsense? The idea that some bank or fund can utterly front-run all clients and every other market participant because they have a super computer connected to an uber internet pipe and they can quote stuff the sh!t out of a stock to pop limits. or that this “liqudity” can dissapear in a milisecond and cause the entire market to crash within that period. Or that they can flash-crash single stocks at the push of a button.
Then you attempt to say that without HFT we’d go back to the $100 commission with spreads at 25c. sorry, but that’s just a ridiculous argument. If the algos were removed we wouldn’t all of the sudden revert. HFT has done nothing at all to help out retail investors and has merely cost them millions if not tens of billions.
It’s pure market manipulation and should be illegal.