pjanoman

While I'm generally pro-HFT and market making, I'm seeing some comments that are equating market making and high frequency trading. They're not the same thing. As an HFT firm, you can have two kinds of strategies: Liquidity providing and liquidity taking. This article calls these two strategies market making and "being an aggressor" in the "Strategy Zero" and "Survival!" sections. The HFT describes their aggressor strategy as follows:

"Mr. F., one of the original hires, coded what we called Strategy Zero. It was simple: have no position, wait for an option edge of a reasonable size, at least a tick. Then, hit it. Wait. Dump it out and take a tick profit."

In this case, the strategy involves 1) seeing that you can buy a security at $10, 2) knowing that the security is actually worth $10.01 and will move to this price in a few seconds, 3) lifting someone's $10 offer, 4) waiting the few seconds for the market to move, and 5) hitting someone's $10.01 bid for a $.01/share profit.

This liquidity taking strategy is not similar to a liquidity providing strategy. Liquidity providing is leaving orders on the order book for anyone to take and gaining money from one person who buys your shares for $10 and from another who sells shares to you at $10.01. This involves more risk to your business.

I think that if you want to debate the merits of whether working at an HFT firm is an actually useful service, you have to look at how often the HFT firm provides liquidity versus takes liquidity. Providing liquidity more obviously tightens spreads and improves prices, as you can't be a successful liquidity provider unless you provide the best prices first. Liquidity taking, however, involves lifting orders from exchanges that you know are incorrectly priced, which seems to me like a more obvious "bad" (or at least less good than liquidity providing).

I'd argue that hiding behind "we let the market determine it" is much more uninspired and unproductive. Economic research now a days is constantly showing that markets are extremely flawed. One example of that is society pressuring employees to not share their wages, which is exactly what this whole article is about.

Honestly I get lost inside of AWS. Only recently was I able to figure out why I was getting charged $.82/month which, in the long run, is really nothing. But it's amazing how hard it was to figure out why I was getting charged for something that I originally thought was just going to be free.

I think apple watch was post jobs. Additionally, while this is more abstract, I think Apple has continued to revolutionize consumer's privacy.

Scarcity alone is definitely not enough to create value. The one piece of artwork I've made in my life is a scarce resource, but that doesn't mean I have people buying it up like its an NFT.

Maybe some people believe that, but overall that seems to be more of a straw-man argument if anything. I believe what is more common is the thought that we, as a country, can provide housing for people who have no place to live without making a large impact on tax payers below the upper class. Or is this naive in your opinion as well?

1) Many times, yes. If we want to analyze things logically, oftentimes people just need a safe place to stay so that things are stolen from them/they can avoid drugs/they can tell an employer that they live somewhere in order to have a more stable life.

2) Even if they don't suddenly get their life together, that is looking at things too logically in my opinion. In my opinion, it is the moral thing to help out the needy, and that means providing housing. America's big enough to do it.

> There would almost surely be a censoring effect no matter what age cutoff you pick

This seems to be an ethical argument to make the age cutoff 0: in other words, medicare for all.

> surely at some level health econometricians are involved in this type of policy and are aware and facilitate whatever trade-offs are being sought.

I feel like this article would not be massive news if this was true. The other case I recall that would be like this is when oil execs held back info that they were causing climate change. That seems to me to be completely different, however, because that was a private company and we're talking about government employees here.

What does youtube do that is monopolistic? Just because all users congregate onto one site doesn't mean that Youtube needs to be broken apart.

Here's the distinction though: $400 out of the $900 million was returned. Thus, it seems like we can't get past your part A) in this case, as hedge funds had enough reason to think the payment was a mistake that they returned it. I doubt the creditors in this case are so heterogeneous such that one creditor has no reason at all to think it was a mistake while another does.

Users are completely free to not use an Apple product. They have lost no freedom of their own will. Users choose this ecosystem over many other options.