Nonsense - what could be more beneficial to society than providing imaginary "liquidity" by interposing yourself between legitimate buyers and sellers?
It's a bit like stock brokers - and why wouldn't we want stock brokers to operate at drastically faster-than-human timescales, because we all know the value of a company changes every nanosecond! And "flash crashes" create opportunities for investors to make huge amounts of money!
And just as crypto has poured money into GPU companies (providing opportunities for enterprising secondary market resellers of same) HFT has poured money into networking companies.
Short of creating the great firewall or helping governments slurp up all the traffic on the internet, what could be a more beneficial application of network technology?
HFT (like finance in general) has also gobbled up lots of tech grads, making it easier to find jobs at tech companies.
> Nonsense - what could be more beneficial to society than providing imaginary "liquidity" by interposing yourself between legitimate buyers and sellers?
Now when I say the same thing about index funds people get all huffy
It's similar, though in theory you are paying the index fund to act as your agent, and the fee structure is observable.
Regarding liquidity, I imagine it's possible that the index fund might allow you to withdraw money faster than you could sell on your own, but realistically I kind of doubt it.
The classic theory of longer term investing is that you are providing capital to businesses and rewarded for that. That is a little bit different from being a middle man. My personal opinion though is that lending money/investing capital and capitalism in general is power. Money quantifies the potential of making other humans do things for you, it allows you to excercise power over fellow humans. Inheritance means you can inherit that power from your parents. It's not all that different from feudalism.
It's a bit like stock brokers - and why wouldn't we want stock brokers to operate at drastically faster-than-human timescales, because we all know the value of a company changes every nanosecond! And "flash crashes" create opportunities for investors to make huge amounts of money!
And just as crypto has poured money into GPU companies (providing opportunities for enterprising secondary market resellers of same) HFT has poured money into networking companies.
Short of creating the great firewall or helping governments slurp up all the traffic on the internet, what could be a more beneficial application of network technology?
HFT (like finance in general) has also gobbled up lots of tech grads, making it easier to find jobs at tech companies.