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Technology Stocks : The *NEW* Frank Coluccio Technology Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (37452)	1/16/2011 2:21:55 PM
From: axial	Respond to of 46821

Hi Frank - As it happens, I didn't read the comments. Nor was there any involvement, however remote, with the linked story. WRT the financial sector over the last few years, there are many issues I regard as essentially "over": regulatory change, direction, societal winners and losers, the network effect with issues of risk and uncertainty, questions of moral and criminal conduct, indeed, the underlying rationalizations for the whole furball. It's over. What we've got is what we'll have until the next crisis - or as anticipated, series of crises. The direction that humanity will take until capitalism collides with energy and climate is assured; the HFT story is a microcosmic example. --- We watch the HFT story devolve in much the same way as we once watched the nuclear arms race, or as history tells us, of battleships at the turn of the previous century. Note the parallels; critics voiced the humanistic issues: the morality of escalating expenditure, preemption and destruction. Supporters stated technological spinoffs, "need" and ideological imperatives. The bolded comment (by a large market participant, not Joe Six-Pack, not some blogger) indicates perceived corruption of a fair market by HFT. The article itself denotes an "antimissile missile", if you will. Score one for fairness. But the HFT arms race will continue, and those with a financial interest in continuation will argue that HFT is good for us. What they mean is that it's good for them. Jim

To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (37452)	1/16/2011 6:59:17 PM
From: Maurice Winn	3 Recommendations Respond to of 46821

Frank, it doesn't matter to me whether the supersonic million mile a minute HFT computers react in 1 second, 100th of a second, 1000th of a second or a millionth of a second. My reaction times is about 20 minutes, after having a nice cup of tea. I wander up to the markets and have a look to see what's on offer and buy it if I like the price. Or, if I'm selling, I put a flag up saying "shares for sale, $31.42 each. Then I wander off, have another cup of tea, read the newspaper [which took the best part of a day to get to me], have a nap, then maybe check to see whether any supersonic HFT computers have accepted my price. The only people who are worried about million mile a minute computers are those with 1000 mile a minute computers who wanted to do the same thing but are just too slow. It's good that some companies can get up to a million miles a minute to speed things up. It all helps with price discovery. The old days of people actually shouting and gesticulating at each other and writing numbers on a chalk board was too slow and left big pricing gaps. At a million miles a minute, those gaps are filled fast. That's good. As WinLoseDraw wrote back in October: Message 26821523 < I'm in the slow lane, too, I choose my prices for entries and exits and everything else is just noise. Now, if I were a thousand-mile-an-hour trader, then yeah it'd be a problem. But if you're gonna bring a knife to a gun fight, you pretty much deserve what you're gonna get! :) > Introducing delays to purportedly make things even doesn't make things even and is a bad idea. A trader lolling around in Rarotonga will experience latency exceeding the delay given so they will still miss out. That's life in the fast lane. What fake delays do is enable swindling because the system can be twitched to secretly dump a few packets off to a friendly supersonic trader to get first dibs on the information. Mqurice