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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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One of my college roommates is an algorithmic high frequency trader. It always reminded me slightly of a legal version of the Superman 3/Office Space scam. Basically trade so fast whenever your algorithm sees the line go up the right way that you harvest tiny amounts all day before the humans actually making financially relevant decisions make the market move in larger chunks for actual economic reasons.
It’s taking money while providing literally zero value to anyone else, even your fellow finance bros.
Don't you have to keep records of every transaction and report them to the IRS ?
I dunno. I’m not suggesting that what they do is illegal, just that it’s useless profit skimming from the inherent inefficiencies of humans getting together to make deals. Before high speed trading, it would just be noise in the line that would level out within minutes or even seconds, but these guys can tell their computers to trade pretty much instantly, and make money off banal shit like “mutual fund X starts their daily 401k purchases right after lunch, and it takes them Y minutes to finish them, so if you see Z orders coming in, have the computer trade at certain threshold and make a few cents.
I’m making that scenario up, and they’re constantly competing with regulators and other firms so it might not even be viable, but the granularity and timeframe and how stupid it is to be able to reliably make money off that kind of variance is very real. Humanity doesn’t move that fast, and there’s nothing of value to society from doing a blackjack rake like that. It’s a fairly small part of the overall market, but it’s just money and brainpower being sucked out of the system for no reason whatsoever.
The thing that gets me about HFT is that the market itself could automatically facilitate price inversion trades. There's literally zero need for these middlemen.