ap0258

The HFTs don’t provide anything and, in fact, take it since regular traders do not have the ability to micro trade and front-run those traders, taking profits from ordinary people.
Somehow the markets functioned well before HFT, I hope they outlaw it soon. The first step was the SEC requesting the algos.

ap0258

justin88 Wrote:
——————————————————-
I never said that “without HFT we’d go back to the
$100 with spreads at 25c”. I was merely pointing
out that the bygone days you yearn for were far
worse than what we have now, particularly for
retail investors. A lot of the innovation we’ve
had has been beneficial for retail investors,
including IMO, HFT.
Yeah, I yearn for the days, perhaps 10 years ago, when everything was massively inefficient. There isn’t a single shred of “innovation” that has been good for retail investors in HFT.

HFT wouldn’t exist unless there was already a
market inefficiency. HFT in essence is providing
small amounts of liquidity for certain names, on
certain venues, at certain times. Retail
investors, while not getting perfect execution,
are getting better execution, partially due to
HFT, than ten years ago. (Very few even paid
attention to execution at all ten years ago.)
What “market inefficiency” are you speaking of? Taking advantage of minute price differences, or blatantly manipulating prices? I guess with such efficient markets we’d never have had the credit bubble or the .bombs. Thank god for HFT.

Perhaps your lolrage is better directed toward the
fragmentation of the markets than HFT? The reason
SS flash crashes happen is because liquidity is
fragmented across dozens of trading venues, many
of which are trading the exact same/fungible
things, but the price on one of those venues
temporarily plummets/rips because someone routed
an outsized amount of flow to that venue relative
to its liquidity.
Yeah, perhaps if we tripled the current volume on the major exchanges we’d have an uber-efficient market. Ohh wait, we already did that and it didn’t do dick to make them more efficient.