In case you guys didn't see this yet, you might enjoy it. "Some" blatant self promotion..... http://www.forbes.com/sites/richard...against-ordinary-human-traders-and-investors/ Don
Dennis is right, we are sucking out more and more liquidity because HFT disadvantaging any kind of passive liquidity. Very dangerous
Don, we've debated this before and I still disagree with you about it. Isn't your avg holding time at Bright now into the weeks? Why do you care about micro structure so much? I continue to struggle why this is an issue for your firm. The truth is, these HFT's guys are eating each other, not the masses. They are putting marginal HFT firms out of business. There are far bigger fish to fry then this in my opinion.
I totally agree. Even if your average hold time is 5 minutes the HFT guys should have little effect on your trading.
in really simple and overlygenralized term, what do you determine whether a bid is "real" so that you can "lean on"
"Real" here seems to mean any resting bid in the lit (visible) public markets. I think that the "leaning on" here is that done by internalizers or wholesalers, beyond the reach of most traders or even "HFT's" per se. To "lean on" as such, you must either have your own order flow (i.e., lots of retail clients of your own), or the means to buy "uninformed" order flow "wholesale" from a retail B/D.
That's true. The HFT guys mostly compete against each other, offering more liquidity for the momentum trader or retail investor. We have high-speed data technology in cars, office equipment, etc. - There's no reason why trading should be any different. The skill set of the average trader will need to increase but I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing. Most intraday traders placing their own trades manually are not competing with HFTs. I've also yet to see one convincing study to show me HFTs hurt anybody. The only time they can hurt investors is when you have the big banks/brokerages abusing it to front-run their clients or what not. The problem is, with the shitheads we have in congress, they will try to go after the smallest HFT traders and turn the blind eye to the abuses they should be looking at. They have to make themselves look busy, afterall and since this is a topic that most people can't even begin to comprehend, it's an easy political sell to say "wall street has such high speed trading equipment, your 401k is gonna go bye bye soon". The complete opposite is true. If anyone is to blame for the economic conditions, it's the very same people trying to pitch us that we need to be more regulated, more taxed, have more licenses, pay more fees, have more penalties, get fined, etc. That's just my 2 cents on the situation.
the street is all full of old line brokers who would like to bring back i.e. bright etc. nickel spreads and the uptick rule. this is no different. they are always to looking to gain a regulatory advantage over the public. you just got bunch of guys who can't adjust. real non hft pro traders are making out like bandits.