alt Hacker NewsEvery few seconds is fine.
Disagree? You think milliseconds is “better” somehow?
Then by that logic microseconds are better still! (A straight-faced argument made by thousands of HFT people.)
Then, surely, nanoseconds matter. Again, some traders care deeply about shaving single digit “nanos” off their response times by using smart NICs that can respond before the incoming packet has even finished arriving! Bypassing the CPU entirely because ermahgerd that would waste precious nanos!
Okay, what about femtoseconds? Attoseconds? Low single digit Plank time units?
Clearly the extrapolation is nonsense.
The problem is that there’s always an advantage to some rent-seeker to be faster than everyone else, so there will never be consensus between them and the general public. Or each other.
It’s a classic tragedy of the commons.
This is why laws are required, to prevent that one greedy guy putting “just one more cow” onto the pasture than the other greedy guys.
Replies
So, seconds good but milliseconds bad? That seems rather arbitrary.
This is the “speculation is bad” take with a side of naïveté about how markets work.
Open an order book. Prices and quantities aren’t decoration; they’re live telemetry for supply, demand, and how tight the crowd’s consensus is at each level. That’s information, full stop.
A human (or machine) trader forms a view of fair value against that tape. The book helps decide how to trade—size, urgency, venue—regardless of motive: arbitrage, hedge, speculation, investment, cash-out. Intent doesn’t change the math.
Prints are messages. Every execution updates everyone else’s priors. More prints → more information → smoother discovery.
Make the book sparse—only a handful of trades per day—and watch confidence collapse. With weaker consensus and wider error bars, people step back. Liquidity thins, friction rises. That’s not morality; that’s microstructure.
Time horizon doesn’t invalidate the signal. A strategy that unfolds over days and one that resolves in milliseconds both add to the dataset. If it trades, it teaches. More resolution in others’ behavior means better prices and deeper books. That’s the game.