> Sometimes people will put out rumors or even go on fiance shows talking about how poorly run some company is. Maybe they make a discreet call to their buddy at the ratings agency and have them downgraded a step.
Some people buy a stock, and then put out rumors or even go on finance shows talking about how great this company is and how its stock is undervalued. And then sell it at the peak, leaving others holding the bag. Yet people don't run around saying that we should ban people from being able to buy stock because of that.
Both the scenarios (the one you describe and the one I describe) are illegal market manipulation. Sure, I would not be surprised if market manipulation of the short side were vastly underprosecuted, but I don't think that's a reason to complain about short selling per se.
Yet people don't run around saying that we should ban people from being able to buy stock because of that.
I honestly wonder if we should sometimes. I struggle to see how the real value created by this whole system outweighs the negatives. It’s been abstracted too far away from "investing in a company" and created too many perverse incentives. Too many people playing numbers games and gambling, under the impression that they're creating value somehow. HFT? How is that anything but absurd?
I feel like we’d be better off going back to a more simple system where actual people have actual skin in the companies they're taking ownership of.
HFT (electronic market making in general, HFT being a particularly potent expression of it) drastically lowered transaction costs for retail investors, and most theories of how HFT is harmful or absurd are based on a lack of understanding of market structure. Is how it's something other than absurd.
Oh, I wouldn’t even call my idle layman thoughts a theory, more of a hunch really.
Have retail investors generally benefitted from doing an amount of trading that would incur significant transaction costs?
Do you think my general sentiment is off base, and the market (as is) is unequivocally a good thing for society as a whole? Even with regular worldwide crises caused by wild speculation, greed, and incompetence?
I would be very interested to read a thorough defense of how the increasingly complex market machinations and instruments are good for “the people” and some indication that their value isn’t entirely captured by the small cohort that dreamed them up. I admit that I understand this very poorly.
A thing retail investors have always done (placing orders to buy and sell stocks) used to cost a lot. Now it's practically free. You can flee to a more abstract argument about whether investing itself is bad, but I'm not interested in debating that, only in observing that HFT had a large hand in eliminating those costs.
I note further that you only attempted to rebut one of the two points I made in my comment.
That’s been my argument/question all along, though. I started off with the sentiment that maybe we should stop people from buying stocks, period. HFT was not the main thrust, I can easily claim that you’ve sidestepped my points as well.
Anyway I’m not trying to debate, I thought it was clear from my last post that I’m not an expert and I’m really just asking questions (sincerely, not rhetorically) and seeking to gain more understanding of the market and its macro-level, “big picture” effects on society.
I'm not interested in and take no position on your broader argument. I'm exclusively interested in: "HFT? How is that anything but absurd?". I think that's easy to refute. If we agree, we agree, that's great.
So HFT is not absurd because it lowered transaction costs for retail investors. What mechanism did it achieve this by?
I call it absurd because computer algorithms trading stocks at the microsecond level seems completely divorced from the theoretical basis of “investing.” I don’t understand how it makes sense on a theoretical level. Reducing transaction costs doesn’t seem to explain that.
For example: HFT-backed trading systems enable companies like Citadel to quote better spreads to retail traders than to hedge and mutual funds, which is why PFOF arrangements are structured in terms of how much better their prices will be than the actual exchange (which they are required to at least match, by regulation).
It's probably the case that no one person needs to make a microsecond-scale trade. But, obviously, there are many people trading, not just one, and making things very fast is one way you make things scale. In reality, though, extremely high performance is probably more important as a vector for competition, which is ultimately what brought spreads down.
Thank you. I definitely have some reading to do in trying to wrap my head around all of this. At first glance, it does seem like some people in the industry (Charlie Munger, Michael Spence) share my perspective (though Munger could just be strategizing).
You know who is almost certainly not strategizing? Vanguard, which is probably the most trustworthy firm in all of finance. You can look up what they've said about HFT, too. :)
I keep coming back to these fundamental questions. HFT (and market making in general) increases liquidity. Why is liquidity a good thing? Why should it be so easy to quickly buy and sell ownership of companies? To me that seems like a bad thing. I feel like I’m just missing some fundamental understanding.
As a powerful investor, you can buy a large position in a company, lobby for changes that increase the short term value of the stock, sell it, and move on, likely destroying it in the process, leaving all of the people who were actually invested in its success holding the bag. Is that to be seen as a net good? It seems like HFT and other instruments are just taking that concept to ever more extreme levels.
I was more specific than "liquidity". I said "reduced spreads and lowered trading costs". It is better for you to pay less to execute a trade than to pay more for it.
I don't know what an HFT MM has to do with people manipulating the stock markets directionally.
Sorry - I was referring more to some other stuff I was reading than anything you said.
It has to do with it because it enables it. It's part of abstracting investing away from providing capital to companies because you believe they will succeed. Somewhere there is an argument for why these abstractions are beneficial to more than just the people profiting off of them. Why do you keep studiously avoiding engaging on this?
I'm interested in discussing things that are knowable, and where I have some chance of learning things. You said that HFT was absurd. It was easy to point out that there are real, practical benefits to HFT (those benefits become even clearer if you do some reading on how crooked the human-scale market making system was prior to HFT; Google, for instance, [odd eighths]).
That's the extent of my interest in this discussion. If you do some research and find out something that refutes my argument about HFT, I'd be interested in learning about it. Otherwise, I think if we're on the same page about this detail of the thread, it's fine to leave it there.
Some people buy a stock, and then put out rumors or even go on finance shows talking about how great this company is and how its stock is undervalued. And then sell it at the peak, leaving others holding the bag. Yet people don't run around saying that we should ban people from being able to buy stock because of that.
Both the scenarios (the one you describe and the one I describe) are illegal market manipulation. Sure, I would not be surprised if market manipulation of the short side were vastly underprosecuted, but I don't think that's a reason to complain about short selling per se.