brownegg

Correlations will tend towards 1 when using a large-enough time frame. On a microstructure scale, correlations go haywire in liquidity distress.

Which part of "buy and hold" includes "sell when it goes down"?

You're conflating two things (in my mind). L2 is very useful to people like me. If it's useful to you, you should be able to handle spoofing.

The "average investor" doesn't need L2, and doesn't care what it says, including flashing "fake" orders.

They don't get unnecessary volatility unless they're paying attention to the order book all the time. Realized equity volatility is MUCH MUCH MUCH lower in the era of HFT.

Yes, "flash crashes" exist, and normally because of liquidity disappearing. Yes, algos are basically sheep that all bail at the same time. But overall, the net effect is massively beneficial to everyone except lazy traders (which include fund managers who miss the days of getting lots of steak dinners from their favorite brokers).

Your question is exactly correct. As long as they are real orders, with real risk of being executed, there should be nothing at all wrong with this behavior. If people are so stupid as to move their orders trivially based on others' actions, they deserve what they get.

The reason this gets prosecuted is that it's an easy target for the exchanges to make it look like they care. They are now publicly-traded companies interested in profits first and foremost--not market integrity (which maybe used to be the case--different discussion).

source: 25-year vet of futures markets, the last 10 in HFT; many many millions of orders and executions

A senior/experienced person offering potentially-qualitatively-better "stuff" in the realm of something like code isn't the point. I'm sure there are exceptions, but in general no one is saying, "Let things be bad." If something would be a lot better, it's not two cents, it's two dollars.

The point is that when the difference is opinion (or close to), such as matters of color, font, position, etc., there is no reason to tweak things. If you're not going to make a big difference, don't make one at all.

If we throw out, even if momentarily, that there's more to success in the markets than pure luck, then people who have succeeded have done so in a very pure way: you can only make money in trading by being right. When you're right as often and to the extent that someone like Soros is, you have insight that 99.9999% of people don't.

Soros is definitely weird at times, and he is almost always too-certain. But your negative characterization of "billionaire investor" is a disservice to you and him. Rather than learn about the world by selling products or climbing a political ladder, he formed opinions and made bets. Massive, massive respect.

You are certainly right that it was fun.

But basically the hypergrowth of the '90s was borrowed from the future. All policy was good if GDP grew. Greenspan noodled on the problem--"irrational exuberance"--but unfortunately became convinced the existing pyramid scheme was working. He's since publicly expressed regret over a ton of those decisions.

Why do you need to prevent 40MB downloads?

Does it not resonate? That line hit me like a ton of bricks. I'm almost an OO fanboy, but that is a _very_ good point.

If it's $862m, last I checked, it will take them about 30 hours to bring in the necessary revenue--if they want to pay out of profits (I'm totally guessing here, what are real net margins on their hardware? 15-20%?), it'll take a couple days.

> I expected to see (1995) tagged to the end of this article.

+1.

The "making hundreds of millions" part made me laugh too. Bet that's news to the index desks.

I can't upvote this hard enough. OP is right in my mind, but....

I'm straight (and divorced), and we got married for many of the same reasons that LGBT folks want to--it makes sense. Visitation rights, inheritance, tax treatment, etc.

It's unlikely that marriage would be removed as something of concern to lawmakers--has that kind of thing ever happened anywhere, any time, any way?

I respect OP's opinion, but it's ivory tower and we're talking about real people right now.

possibly unnecessary edit: just want to reiterate that I think OP is _right_, it's just not practical, and I'll sacrifice rightness for a rather-large "quick and dirty win".