alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
Replies
Millisecond trading strategies have zero relationship to information about companies or economic fundamentals and are therfore not economically productive. They're exploiting microstructure inefficiencies like latency arbitrage, order front-running, not price discovery. That's not 'teaching' the market it's a tax on everyone else's execution. The fact that it's legal doesn't make it structurally useful. It is just a result of the rules not being updated when trading became automated at superhuman speeds
This is one of the best comments I've seen on HN.