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Comment by UweSchmidt | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who buys organically is buying after the HFT firms have made their buying decisions on the entirety of the market, it's not possible to "wait a day or two". The deal will be incrementally worse as these firms extract value, your price will be the one that all of these firms deemed "meh".

It's like walking into a grocery store and the banana you really want it 1$ and you'll buy. Because that's the price that highly sophisticated middlemen between the store and you have determined to be good.

The liquidity argument is abstract and unquantifyable enough to be used as a fig leaf for the industry. Real investors who are in it for fundamental values, dividends or strategy don't need to sell in a nanosecond. Now that you can sell in a nanosecond your deal is bad, as in the moment you hear of the Volkswagen scandal all the trading algorithms are done with their work already.

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> Now that you can sell in a nanosecond your deal is bad, as in the moment you hear of the Volkswagen scandal all the trading algorithms are done with their work already.

You can only sell in a nanosecond because someone else is willing to buy in a nanosecond. And if your goal is to earn money trading in time horizons of minutes or hours or even days, you probably are not equipped to do that as a retail investor.

Why should you have the right to dump VW after the scandal and not someone else? What about an investor that did not read the news until the next day?

> The deal will be incrementally worse as these firms extract value, your price will be the one that all of these firms deemed "meh".

No one owes you arbitrage opportunity. If you think the banana is worth $1, then it is worth $1. Maybe a nanosecond ago you could have bought it at $.999999, but as long as you still think it is worth $1, then what is the problem with paying $1?

Not the right place to debate further but it seems this topic seems to be underdiscussed or I present my points not well enough. Certainly my goal is neither to earn money in horizons of days, nor to have arbitrage opportunities at all. All of that is nonsense and would assume the legitimacy of people who sit in front of computer screens looking at stock charts. Value creating is a long term endeavour and so should be investing.

If we let go of the mentality to "dump VW after the scandal before someone else" we find ourselves with bad news about VW and new conclusions about a good value for the stock and people buying and selling accordingly after all have ready their morning paper. A small Tobin tax or other technical measures can prevent unethical actors from taking the banana out of your shopping cart and pricing it within nanoseconds.

The supply-and-demand maximalism is a holdover from anticommunist thinking and ignores market distortions like Zillow's real estate buying.

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