France, Germany to Propose Financial-Transaction Tax
- Thread starter ASusilovic
- Start date
"Then the fun begins as these a$$holes can't trade for toffee unless the pc does it for them."
some of them were successful traders before. becoming hft traders was the next level up for them.
"Common sense tells me they're gonna be toast"
they will move on to the next big game assuming markets remain open.
in spite of your words your anger suggests that you could not adjust to the hft traders.
Yadda yadda yadda, another useless EU summit that is more words than action... what's new? 
nice video about algos
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html
Quote from Kazak_Trader:
Yadda yadda yadda, another useless EU summit that is more words than action... what's new?
it may be one more useless conference. then one day there is a conference whose results affect your ability, in a deleterious way, to trade.
yadda .... is a symptom of overconfidence and/or oversimplification which is a dangerous combination.
Nice answer... You don't even have the discipline to keep yourself from swearing. Get real...
Now to the subject...
HFTs don't affect the market trend in any way in my opinion. Hate to break it to you but markets have what you call "flash crashes" all the time. This is nothing new.
Think about it for a minute... HFTs trade in really short periods of time... So what happens... ? HFT buys stock XYZ at price 10.01 and sells it at price 10.02, you really think that kind of action is going to destroy the market...? What about on the downside... HFT sells stock XYZ at 10.02 and covers at 10.01 BUY/SELL and SELL/BUY within really short periods of time. Same size... Mind you there are lots of different algos doing all sorts of work. It is new technology and the world adjusts to new technology. Unless, you want to go back to phoning orders in... Then things will be nice and slow but the market will still have "flash crashes" and large percent drops in a single day. That won't change in any way.
If you're going to tax anybody then you should tax homeowners... They're the ones who crashed the market. Better yet, the lenders should also be taxed. In fact, anyone who does speculative lending of a very risky and predatory nature should be taxed. There should also be a law that says that the tax can't be passed on to consumers.
The fact of the matter is that the economy is in the gutter. The market should have crashed that hard. Just consider how big the losses were due to poorly regulated lending.
There are lending, borrowing and spending problems in the economy. There is nothing wrong with the market technology or the market structure.
Markets going to the upside out of control "meltup" is also a horrible thing, consider the inflation... But you never hear anybody complaining about that. No one is like "Crap... I hate these HFTs pushing prices up this fast...!" In reality, order flow changes all the time.
Sorry to break it to all of you but there is no order in the market.
Uh huh... That's what happens during crashes. Nobody steps in front of bulldozers. You can say the same thing about 1929... The point is crashes happen despite changes in technology.
That is true - HFT will not affect longer term market trends. The more important point, however, that you seem to ignore and gloss over, is that HFT does NOT improve bid/ask liquidity during times of market stress. The other point you ignore is that numerous post-mortem reports on the 'flash crash' points to the disorder that HFT introduces into the market structure at the worse possible times during market stress.
Technology doesn't stop big money lenders from being stupid.