When I press the buy and sell button, I want the transaction to happen as quickly as possible. So does everyone else.
My millionth of a second is different than yours, and everyone else’s.
It is no different than buying or selling anything else. And there is no loss from the additional liquidity, you can easily set a limit at which you want to buy or sell.
The only way to implement this is to eliminate competition between exchanges.
There are two different things being talked about here.
Trading based on arbitrage between exchanges will happen in one way or another no matter what.
Trading millions of times per second automatically on the same exchange when some people have low latency computers at the exchange with huge amounts of extra information is not necessary.
Also, Wall Street would love this. The more of the order book you submitted, the more information you have about its composition.
The point isn't to make something 'wall street hates' it's to make something that doesn't get money eaten away by automated computers in the middle so that it's the best option for people making trading decisions on people time scales.
Retail investors railing against HFTs are sort of like those San Francisco types who protest new development to the benefit of their landlords.
It's nothing like that since there isn't a limited resource and everyone has access to the core purpose, which is to trade stocks.
What I notice with these discussions is that no one can actually explain why a retail investor or anyone would want computers trading underneath them millions of times a second.
At best they try to give hft credit for the automation that happened with computers anyway.
The only people that want it are the people doing it. That's not a business, that's a grift.
> The point isn't to make something 'wall street hates' it's to make something that doesn't get money eaten away by automated computers in the middle so that it's the best option for people making trading decisions on people time scales.
Why is this desirable? It seems like an argument designed only to serve the interests of a small class of person who insists on doing manual trades themselves.
The rest of what you've written just sounds like "I lost money because computers are better than me at the task." I'm not sympathetic to that concern. Computers are better than me at lots of things, so I just don't try to compete at those things. I pay people with access to the computers to do them for me, and then I focus on the things I'm good at instead. Division of labor and all that.
Anyone who isn't involved in HFT should be in favor of rules that slow down trades to human time scales. HFT currently favors a small class of rich people.
> Anyone who isn't involved in HFT should be in favor of rules that slow down trades to human time scales
What are you basing this on?
I’m a former algorithmic market maker. Every plan to “slow down trades to human time scales” I’ve seen were trivially gameable. They were always proposed by a group of concerned citizens, and then jumped on by my bosses, because if the market is slowed down to pre-HFT speeds, Wall Street can make pre-HFT profits on risk-free trading again.
Do you think the internet would work better if we forcibly increased latency? If we did, if the argument were this would flatten the market and better let small websites compete with CDNs, do you think that would actually happen? Google and Cloudflare would say “oh well,” and disassemble their servers?
Our markets have structural problems. They are mostly solvable. HFT is none of them, which is why you keep hearing about it from folks who don’t want reform.
> "How does HFT provide social benefit to the world at large?"
It's explained multiple times in this very discussion. It's not our fault if you refuse to read them. But the most straightforward and obvious way is that it injects liquidity into the market, making it easier to sell when you need to liquidate. (It also reduces volatility overall, another good thing.)
> > the exchanges weren't established for the abstract sake of money, they were established to provide benefit to people.
Snort. The exchanges were established by wealthy people, for wealthy people, to engage in business with other wealthy people.
The NYSE was established in 1792. Is it your contention that anyone except the elites were buying and selling stocks in 1792? Let alone all the exchanges that pre-date the NYSE. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was set up in the 1600s specifically to facilitate the buying and selling of Dutch East India Company shares. Was Farmer Aardhuis buying shares? Or aristocrats and royalty?
I suspect the root argument is really against the efficacy of markets and capitalism as a useful system for humanity, in which case I say that is a fair debate. The benefits are hardly obvious today.
> not me. I don't mind if it takes like 20 seconds or so
Which is fine! You can probably find a broker who will give you fee-free trading with that preference. The price you execute at won’t be as good. But unless you’re trading millions, that’s probably fine.
My millionth of a second is different than yours, and everyone else’s.
It is no different than buying or selling anything else. And there is no loss from the additional liquidity, you can easily set a limit at which you want to buy or sell.