The EE/IC Design part of me loves this for trying to build a community around what is typically a very opaque and secretive industry. The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
this reply isn't in good faith. OP is being self critical examining contradictions of living in complex interdependent societies. why are your queries so aggressively factional?
There is a very vocal minority of folks that when they come across a comment that at all looks like an opponent of ancap [1], they become unhinged, even in this case where the GP was being internally reflective about their own beliefs.
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
Which is especially ironic when they bring up an example like Cuba, where at least today, you can’t really say whether the policies or de facto sanctioning it receives are at fault for the current economic state.
they just said a planned economy where people's judgements of what is "valuable" allocate resources would not be a good idea, i dont see how that is "ancap" nor really all that wrong?
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
The HFT industry creates an investment opportunity that's somewhat detached from business fundamentals. If you can trade on the volatility alone, you no longer need to pick investments based on their future prospects and behaviour.
I don’t think Jane Street does high frequency trading. I think you might be thinking of Citadel or HRT. Jane Street is more of an old-school quant hedge fund, no?
Their bread and butter was, and as far as I know still is, trading in ETFs and ADRs. These things have a mechanism to create and redeem in exchange with underlying securities. This means one can make some money arbitraging differences between the bundle and components.
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
<a href="https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator" rel="nofollow">https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator The number of "devkits" is the number of chips you'll get, the number of tiles is the size of your design. You can see how many tiles current projects use here: <a href="https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d" rel="nofollow">https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
There is also a FOSSi matrix chat group: <a href="https://element.fossi-chat.org/" rel="nofollow">https://element.fossi-chat.org/
>>The social justice / millenial part of me hates this for being funded by high frequency trading, of all things. What a colossal waste of resources.
HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
i remember trading a us stock twenty years ago, i don't live in the us, i used a discount broker, the flat commission was something like $20+percentage of trade. this was significantly after there had apparently a massive drop in costs.
there is some kind of amnesia that exists with things that used to cost massive amounts but are now close to free. it is just not possible to explain to someone that in the recent past, most people were just unable to own stocks because of costs.
HFT isn't necessary for cheap online trading. You can have bulk transactions execute once per day for very low cost and that's good enough for an efficient market. Companies spending billions to beat other bidders by milliseconds is just rent extraction with computers.
The core problem is that large numbers of people trade for effectively no good reason. Because of HFT, these people are now less screwed than they were previously. The "house" is competitive.
Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT. I'm not too bothered by that.
If you want to direct your ire somewhere, direct it at companies like Robinhood that are gamifying financial markets.
Things are a bit cheaper. It's pretty diffuse, but then so are the supposed harms they perpetrate as well. HFT is realistically a tiny part of modern finance. Huge numbers of professional traders made in total much more money doing the same job before it was automated.
Strong disagree. Liquidity at the level of milliseconds means insider trading and other information disparity is more profitable and encourages people to make rash decisions on incomplete information rather than well informed decision.
I'd love go see any information that proves that trades at the millisecond level lead to measurable improvements over, say, trades executing once per hour.
this is meant to be a funny and stylized comment. if you can't read to the end, copy and paste it into a chatbot and ask it what I am saying.
there were always two possibilities about why math/STEM stuff was important to these people like Jane Street or whatever:
- they sincerely need to apply theoretical math to, i don't know, better exploit trading rules.
- this stuff was always a shibboleth to select for a certain kind of person.
Okay, what kind of person? it helps to be that kind of neurodivergent, because it's easier to be unethical if it furthers your special interest. like yeah, obviously it's a huge waste of resources and time, and if you just erased the total output of Jane Street, Two Sigma, Citadel, whatever, literally nothing of value would be lost.
the sad thing is, do we need any of this? like what does this say about "puzzle solving?" puzzle solving has nothing to do with problem solving. why do we call it problem solving? all of our problems are political. nobody at Jane Street solves any problems whatsoever, they only seem to create them!
kayson · · focus · HN ↗
TacticalCoder · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
salvesefu · · focus · HN ↗
genxy · · focus · HN ↗
The irony has most likely circled their drain (which just goes into a creek anyways).
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
msdz · · focus · HN ↗
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
Nobody mentioned that crazy scenario so why bring it up?
BTW the USA is already a planned economy.
rowanG077 · · focus · HN ↗
bluecalm · · focus · HN ↗
It's more efficient now than it used to be - by which I mean the total taken by HFTs is lower than what people used to pay in spreads and commisions. Price discovery is better (you get closer to a fair price if you trade) and spreads are lower. The whole industry that used to prey on spreads and ignorance of retail investors is gone. What not to like about HFT?
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe they're both bad?
selestify · · focus · HN ↗
shric · · focus · HN ↗
I’d estimate the total global HFT revenue to be 100 billion dollars a year, which is less than Apple and a tiny percentage of all big tech combined.
anon-3988 · · focus · HN ↗
skippyboxedhero · · focus · HN ↗
bluecalm · · focus · HN ↗
Same goes for market making.
If someone is getting rich providing that service - great! Additional bonus is that it's usually very smart people getting the money.
hakfoo · · focus · HN ↗
kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
wyre · · focus · HN ↗
vzcx · · focus · HN ↗
As this game got more competitive they seem to have branched out into other kinds of business including HFT.
vzcx · · focus · HN ↗
tolugenius · · focus · HN ↗
tredre3 · · focus · HN ↗
They group dozens to hundreds of designs on one chip. The end result is that even hobbyists can afford to have their small ASIC on real silicon. It's still expensive but it's within reach of a serious enthusiast with a steady job.
<a href="https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator" rel="nofollow">https://app.tinytapeout.com/calculator The number of "devkits" is the number of chips you'll get, the number of tiles is the size of your design. You can see how many tiles current projects use here: <a href="https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d" rel="nofollow">https://app.tinytapeout.com/shuttles/ttsky26d
vzcx · · focus · HN ↗
There is also a FOSSi matrix chat group: <a href="https://element.fossi-chat.org/" rel="nofollow">https://element.fossi-chat.org/
tolugenius · · focus · HN ↗
optimiz3 · · focus · HN ↗
HFT makes the market more efficient, just like the AI eliminating jobs makes business more efficient. It's been numbing watching HN gladly sacrifice it's own to the altar of AI over and over. There is no moral high ground.
Personally as a retail quant, it's really rewarding to build models that extract edge from the market using the very AI tools that have eliminated all hope of ever re-entering the tech-field absent being an entrepreneurial founder.
skippyboxedhero · · focus · HN ↗
there is some kind of amnesia that exists with things that used to cost massive amounts but are now close to free. it is just not possible to explain to someone that in the recent past, most people were just unable to own stocks because of costs.
Arainach · · focus · HN ↗
didjdjeidjrj484 · · focus · HN ↗
jsw97 · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT. I'm not too bothered by that.
If you want to direct your ire somewhere, direct it at companies like Robinhood that are gamifying financial markets.
maest · · focus · HN ↗
Wait till you see what the exchanges make.
Kinrany · · focus · HN ↗
Retr0id · · focus · HN ↗
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
rcxdude · · focus · HN ↗
affyboi · · focus · HN ↗
Arainach · · focus · HN ↗
Strong disagree. Liquidity at the level of milliseconds means insider trading and other information disparity is more profitable and encourages people to make rash decisions on incomplete information rather than well informed decision.
I'd love go see any information that proves that trades at the millisecond level lead to measurable improvements over, say, trades executing once per hour.
doctorpangloss · · focus · HN ↗
there were always two possibilities about why math/STEM stuff was important to these people like Jane Street or whatever:
- they sincerely need to apply theoretical math to, i don't know, better exploit trading rules.
- this stuff was always a shibboleth to select for a certain kind of person.
Okay, what kind of person? it helps to be that kind of neurodivergent, because it's easier to be unethical if it furthers your special interest. like yeah, obviously it's a huge waste of resources and time, and if you just erased the total output of Jane Street, Two Sigma, Citadel, whatever, literally nothing of value would be lost.
the sad thing is, do we need any of this? like what does this say about "puzzle solving?" puzzle solving has nothing to do with problem solving. why do we call it problem solving? all of our problems are political. nobody at Jane Street solves any problems whatsoever, they only seem to create them!