Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

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> Are you aware of the distinction between market orders and limit orders?

Yes.

> HFTs by themselves can provide liquidity (like any other investor)

Exactly: like any other investor. Meaning, the "high frequency" part of HFT is not what provides the liquidity. (I admit that I should have made that clearer in my previous post.)

Suppose an HFT enters a limit order that is more competitive than the current limit. Either some other investor would have been willing to trade at the same price (as the HFT's limit order), or not. If not, then it doesn't matter how fast the HFT places the limit order; it's going to increase liquidity in any case. So the "high frequency" part is not necessary; the key is that the HFT is an investor willing to trade at a certain price.

But if some other investor would have been willing to trade at the same price, then the only difference the HFT makes is speed: the liquidity gets added sooner than it otherwise would have. So the "high frequency" part doesn't change anything except who the profits from the trade go to.

The "high frequency" in HFT compared to human traders is a little like the "high fructose" in HFCS compared to table sugar. To wit: "high frequency" changes the relationship of HFT to other sell-side traders; it's what allows HFT shops to potentially outcompete human market-makers.

However, it's the category of sell-side traders in general that matters for liquidity.

You're using imprecise language here (for instance, referring to market makers as "investors"), but the clear implication is that you believe that normal, "buy-side" investors provide adequate liquidity. But they don't, and we know that, because the more competitive the sell-side gets, the lower spreads get.

> you believe that normal, "buy-side" investors provide adequate liquidity

Well, of course that depends on how you define "adequate". What is all this incessant trading of stocks for? What value does it provide? For example, if I'm an investor (a "real" one, not a market maker, to use less imprecise language) with a long time horizon, something like 30 years, because I'm saving for retirement, how does HFT make me better off?

One obvious benefit of "incessant trading of stocks" is that buy-and-hold investors can move in and out of a position for much less than they could in the 80s. The "incessant trading" reduces costs, which can be very important even to value investors when there is some extrinsic prompt to trading.

> buy-and-hold investors can move in and out of a position for much less than they could in the 80s

In other words, brokerage fees, or the equivalent, should be lower, so the overhead to execute a trade is lower. That has some value, yes, but not a lot, because a buy-and-hold investor, of course, doesn't execute many trades, so the overhead cost of executing trades is already pretty small for him.

Also, most "buy-and-hold" investors hold mutual funds, not stocks, which changes things. See below.

> costs...can be very important even to value investors when there is some extrinsic prompt to trading

Yes, but as I just noted, most "buy-and-hold" investors are holding mutual funds, not stocks, so they aren't paying the direct costs of stock trading anyway. When I want to rebalance my 401k, I don't trade stocks, I trade mutual fund shares, and they're all shares of different funds offered by Fidelity or Vanguard or whoever my 401k provider is. (And with most 401k's, certainly with the ones I have, as long as you don't rebalance too often there is no fee for rebalancing.)

So decreasing the overhead cost of trading will only appear to me, if at all, as a decrease in mutual fund fees; but with most 401k's the individual doesn't see those anyway, because they're provided through employers. I don't know how much the fee question affects the negotiations between employers and mutual fund providers for setting up 401k's, but in any case that's at least two layers of indirection between me as a retirement investor and the overhead cost of executing individual stock trades.

So I can see some small benefit, yes, but is it enough to offset the high social cost of having so many smart people doing HFT instead of something more productive?

NO. Not "brokerage fees".

Whatever you pay to your brokerage, you pay on top of the spread. The spread is what you pay to place a market order.

In exchange for the privilege of buying right now, you pay the best offer price. In exchange for the privilege of selling right now, you pay the best bid price.

It's a commission you pay per share; the more shares you try to move, the more you pay whoever's providing you the liquidity.

> Whatever you pay to your brokerage, you pay on top of the spread. The spread is what you pay to place a market order.

I agree with you for the case of a "buy and hold" investor buying or selling actual shares of stock (with the proviso that the overhead to such an investor is already pretty low since he doesn't execute many trades, so the gain to him from something like HFT decreasing the bid-ask spread is small). But as I noted, many, probably most, "buy and hold" investors hold mutual funds through 401k's, not individual stocks.

For example, I have a 401k. I don't place market orders. I rebalance my portfolio every so often, which, after a lot of intermediate steps, might result in some mutual fund manager placing a market order. But I don't see any of the direct costs associated with that, whether it's paying the spread or anything else. I only see the net overhead of the mutual fund as a whole. (And, as I noted, for a lot of 401k's, like mine, I don't even see that, because the 401k mutual funds are no-load.)

The ability of your mutual fund to provide low fee investments is directly related to their execution costs to trade to rebalance their portfolio.

Whether it is a direct line item on your prospectus or not is immaterial. No load mutual funds are more successful when they have lower execution costs. The biggest driver to low execution costs is an electronic market and then the bid/ask spread. HFT enable both of those low costs.

> HFT enable both of those low costs

I see how HFT can narrow the bid-ask spread, but how does HFT enable an electronic market? Isn't it the other way around?

HFT doesn't enable electronic markets, it drives down the cost of them. The reason for this is that HFT participants are high volume users of electronic market infrastructure and have a vested interest in making that infrastructure cheap.

Ah, ok, that makes sense.

The speed for a market maker (largely passive and posting limit orders) isn't about how fast you can place a limit order, it is about how fast you can cancel it. It is a defensive mechanism against predators who are even quicker (arbitrageurs, aggressive HFTs).

Imagine that there is a "true price" of some security at price x, and your bid and your offer are positioned around that true price at x - d (your bid) and x + d (your offer). So your spread is 2d. Then some external (public) event happens, which moves the true price by an amount greater than d. Let's say it is a big event, and the true price falls by 4d. Now there is a race. If you don't manage to cancel your bid in time, a predator will 'pick you off', take out your bid, and they'll sell to you at (x - d) when the true price is now (x - 4d). The predator has made an immediate (paper) profit of 3d, and you've made a loss of the same amount. If you're fast enough, you can successfully cancel your bid and repost it further down the book at x - 5d.

Now, as a market maker, a liquidity provider, you could increase your safety margin by quoting a wider spread, setting your bid and offer at +- 2d instead of +- 1d. Now it takes a larger move before you're in danger of being "picked off", but you'll also attract less customers and make less profits. Speed (latency) is directly correlated to how tight a spread a market maker can quote.

What benefit do tighter spreads and faster response times provide to ordinary investors, like me with my retirement fund? I understand how they benefit the market makers; you've explained that. But all that really determines is who takes losses when an exogenous event that affects the underlying fundamentals of a stock gets reflected in its price. That's a zero-sum exchange: the market maker's loss is the predator's gain. How does all this create value on net?

If you need to buy/sell right now, having tighter spreads means that the price is cheaper for you. Your retirement fund, they need to buy/sell right now all the time, to re-balance their portfolio, whether for risk or for benchmark tracking, cash allocations, etc.

See my response to tptacek upthread.

Saw your response and I'd offer the following: A) the advantages that automation bring to the markets impact every single trade there is. Even if we take a very tiny sample of people who need to rebalance their EFTs today. Each day it is a tremendous savings. B) HFT is a tiny part of the finance industry, yet it has had a huge impact on the cost of trading, to the end result of trading being phenomenally cheaper than it has ever been.

Is that enough of an advantage to outweigh the cost of the small number of intelligent people in HFT? I don't know, but it certainly seems easier to justify than the phenomenal amount of capital spent on internet ads. I'm a bit of a free market capitalist, so my biased response is how else should we allocate people's output?

> the small number of intelligent people in HFT

I don't actually have a sense of how big or small the number is as a percentage of intelligent people. Particularly when you observe that, as you say, HFT is just a tiny part of the finance industry. There are many other parts of that industry that are also sucking up smart people to do things that, to me, have very little value compared to the other things those people could be doing.

> how else should we allocate people's output

Sorry to redirect again, but see my response to pas upthread. :-)

Again, looking at your other posts, I can only assume either A) you socially value internet ads much higher than most people who claim to value social equity over profit or B) you underestimate how many resource we as a society are throwing at internet ads or C) you over value how many resources we as a society are throwing at automated market making. In any case, Google by itself, whose entire revenue model seems to be based on internet ads, makes more profits in a year than the entire HFT industry does.

So it's hard to have the "it's terrible so many smart people are doing X" argument when our society has made it pretty obvious we value selling internet ads as high as any other possible commercial enterprise.

Me, I'll take the other position, which is that yes, the markets are bad at allocating capital, but they are better than our alternatives, and the silly little pocket change inefficiencies that go into speculative market making are a small price to pay for all the advantages of a modern liquid, price efficient market.

> you socially value internet ads much higher

How are you getting that from what I said? You could s/HFT/internet ads/ in my post in response to pas and it would be pretty much the post I would have written about internet ads if that had been the subject under discussion. (Well, not really, because you'd have to change other things as well, but hopefully you see what I mean.)

> markets are bad at allocating capital, but they are better than our alternatives

This I agree with. But markets are as bad (or good) at allocating capital as the people who participate in them. In other words, markets reflect the values of the people who trade. I wasn't ranting about markets not being able to properly compensate curing cancer because markets are bad; I was ranting about people's values being so screwed up that the price signals they are sending into markets are making people rich for HFT and internet ads but not for curing cancer.

"How are you getting that from what I said?"

It's implied by what you didn't say. You don't require technologists involved in internet ads to justify their existence whenever a post about google comes up. Nor when news breaks of a new internet startup being acquired. I'm picking on you a little bit as a proxy for the entire HN community, as there seems to be a bias against HFT and towards internet ads that is a little unseemly.

Further, I'm not convinced you understand the scope of money involved in HFT vs cancer treatment for instance. When Roche bought genentech (a cancer research company) they paid 46 billion dollars for the privilege. Knight Capital Group, one of the biggest players in HFT is worth around 1.4 billion dollars. The market seems to be allocating resources correctly. The PR companies on the other hand...

> You don't require technologists involved in internet ads to justify their existence whenever a post about google comes up

Wow, you've gone through my entire HN corpus to verify that?

> I'm picking on you a little bit as a proxy for the entire HN community

I would prefer that you didn't do that, since I am not a good proxy for any community that thinks figuring out ways to get people to click on ads is a good use of smart people's time and energy. (Btw, I'm not sure that the entire HN community is such a community; a part of it may be.)

> The market seems to be allocating resources correctly

The numbers you give are interesting, but I'm not so much interested in money as in human resources. Genentech may have cost $46 billion, but are they paying smart people enough to get them to do cancer research instead of becoming quants?

Some of this may be a perception problem, as you imply by your comment on PR companies. What data I've seen on where smart people can get paid the most indicates that it's not cancer research. But I'm sure the data I've seen is incomplete; I would love to see more comprehensive data if there is any.

So you've accepted that greater speeds allow market makers to quote tighter, so the answer is pretty simple. The tighter a market maker is quoting the less money he is making per transaction (smaller spread), so less money is leaving the system and going to middlemen. The speed allows them to undercut other market-makers and steal their 'flow' (customers) while still being able to avoid predators, and so they offer the service cheaper. The service being the provision of liquidity to bridge time gaps in a continuous time market.

If you assume that the number of 'real' trader (not middlemen) who want to buy or sell is constant (not necessarily true, but assume it for a moment), then it stands to reason that the tighter the spread, the less the market makers are profiting. At a small enough spread, they make no profit, since the profit from the flow on both sides is cancelled out by the losses from adverse selection (trading when they couldn't cancel in time - being victim to a predator). But if they can increase their speed, and minimize their adverse selection losses, then they can quote tighter and still make a profit. And do it with machines, and cut overheads of hiring humans, and you can quote even tighter since you need less trading profit to make a net profit. So this is the value generated, automation + speed = the smallest amount of frictional costs being extracted from the market.

> automation + speed = the smallest amount of frictional costs being extracted from the market.

Ok, this makes sense. But it still leaves the question, how much are the frictional costs decreased by HFT, and is that benefit enough to offset the social costs?

> social costs?

Such as? All I heard was smart boys and girls go and do a quantitative finance degree instead of Solve The World's Problems degree.

And that's bullshit. The social cost of _not_ providing other, better alternatives to our youth (downsizing NASA, underfunding research and scientific endeavors), lack of patent reform, lack of bandwidth and unified cross-country 3G/4G has much worse costs.

> smart boys and girls go and do a quantitative finance degree instead of Solve The World's Problems degree

No, they go and do a Solve The World's Problems degree and then end up in quantitative finance because they can't get rich solving the world's problems.

> The social cost of _not_ providing other, better alternatives to our youth (downsizing NASA, underfunding research and scientific endeavors), lack of patent reform, lack of bandwidth and unified cross-country 3G/4G has much worse costs

I think we're in violent agreement. This is exactly the social cost I was talking about. Our society is run by people who can't be bothered to compensate someone properly for curing cancer, but who will throw millions of dollars a year at someone for shaving a few microseconds off an HFT algorithm. That makes no sense to me.

Why are things this way? Lots of reasons, of course, but one of them is that, whenever anyone suggests that maybe it would be better if smart people were directed into more productive endeavors, the financial people have kittens and say it's going to wreck the world's economy if we don't shave those few microseconds off the HFT algorithm, because there won't be enough liquidity or something like that.

And that is bullshit. Sure, if we were at a point where all the big problems were solved, then yes, making tiny incremental improvements in the price of liquidity might be near the top of the priority list. But as things are, it should be somewhere around 56,732nd place. The problem to be solved is that there is huge, huge value to be captured by things like curing cancer, much, much more value than there is to be captured by shaving microseconds off HFT algorithms, but nobody knows how to capture it. How is making stock trading a fraction of a percent more efficient going to fix that?

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