alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
I feel like all of these points beg us to loop around and ask the question : "How does HFT provide social benefit to the world at large?"
the exchanges weren't established for the abstract sake of money, they were established to provide benefit to people.
Does HFT still do this overall, or is it for the benefit of a small in-group of elite? Why is that favorable? Because we nobodies can buy the ETF?