CPATrader

spierce Wrote:
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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.
Front-running isn’t the same thing as HFT. You can criticize front-running without criticizing HFT.
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.
If liquidity disappears and no one trades, then the market won’t fall. It takes people wanting to sell more than buy when liquidity dries up (no one seems to are about liquidity drying up and the market rising 100%, only falling 100%). I’m sorry, but I don’t have much sympathy for the panic-sellers. Anyway, if there are some prints -20% down, that doesn’t mean that volume-weighted prices for the day really changed much.
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.
I think the decline in commission has more to do with regulatory changes than the narrowing of spreads.
HFT has done nothing at all to
help out retail investors and has merely cost them
millions if not tens of billions.
HFT would have to steal more money than the narrowing of the spreads would have saved them.