marshallp

I'm not confusing anything. Yes the previous crash wasn't HFT but current trends will lead to the already rich (the banks) being the HFT's because the land surrounding the exchange is limited and costs will increase (HFT is about land and computer resources, and high speed networks - new models don't factor in as much). It won't be programmers calling the shots, they'll be employed by the banks. Already, the average geek is outgunned (overall competitiveness has decreased).

The argument you're making is in favor of my argument of regulating HFT (I want a limit to daily or weekly trade, others want more taxation).

As to regulation on healthcare/drones/cars etc. things aren't perfect, that's all I'm saying. I think things are too restrictive right now, I'm not arguing for abolition of all regulations.

edit: Yes, retail investors should be trading more. That's the idea behind the recent rise in crowdfunding. Innovation happens a lot faster in small c capitalism than in big C capitalism.

HFT is not "automation" in the traditional sense. Stock markets exist to raise funding for projects (exits using ipo, new projects in public companies). Those occur on the day+ scale, not milliseconds. There's no point to increasing the speed of it (other than just for the sake of increasing the speed). It's like increasing the speed of the channel switching on your tv - after a certain point it's better to devote engineering resources on other aspects of the tv.

I don't see how that contradicts.

(I mean trading in daily/weekly - not intra-day)

Concentrating trading in a few hands is the problem we had - too big to fail. HFT will lead to barriers to new entrants (because of increasing startup costs).

That's not false - capitalism is justified by it's proponents by it's ability to serve the public better than socialism (the majority of the public wants more socialism - entitlements/public services etc). Some aspects of capitalism (copyrights, patents, HFT, pollution) are not serving the public and there are valid arguments from the opposing side.

My goal is to trade daily/weekly (in addition to monthly/yearly). I don't want to seconds/minutes/hours (and so can't many others - so the "competitiveness" of markets is actually reduced).

Ultimately, stock markets exist to raise funds for projects (exits for entrepreneurs, financing projects in large corps) - they occur on the daily-years timeframe, not seconds/minutes/hours.

Reducing the trading increment is what a futures market does anyway (you can buy contracts to remove the volatility of second/minute/daily activity).

Most people can't do that because their money will be put there by their 401K (which if they don't put money in willl lose out as well).

You should be upset. Why is it that only select few can have reserve requirements and make interest on free loans from the central bank. It's a direct transfer of wealth to the chosen few.

It's more nuanced than that. There are things like patents and copyrights. When it suits them, big C capitalists demand longer trading terms, then turn around and say the opposite when it comes to HFT (shorter trading terms). (They also do this with their accredited investor requirements).

HFT harms society because it cuts off the number of investors that can do active trading. It's net effect is the same as regulations the keep out entrepreneurs from innovating in things like health care and drones and car manufacturing.

F1 racing is a game. You're then equating stock trading with a game (a casino) when it should be serving everyone in society.

Closing off a large number of people because they lack "sophistication" is called facism. We should be striving for small c capitalism.

The evil Rothschild's are still costing today. A redistribution of wealth that was accumulated prior to 1900 should be instituted (or maybe for even before 1980).

That's not entirely true. I'm an amateur and I want to invest actively using statistics. But getting tick data (covering years/decades) is costly and dealing with it as well. I could handle it if it were daily (if all trades were limited to 9am auction every day. This would also allow room for much more extensive modeling of other data sources and longer term predictions).

Yeah, but they are getting free marketing on here, it's not exactly a bootstrapped startup.

Another reason to limit trading to daily or weekly or montly. The trading arms race is focusing on speed when it should be focusing on predicting longer term outcomes. The easiest way to do so would be to limit all trades to once per day in an auction system. Then traders would pour their resources into building sophisticated systems that make long range predictions and so also identify new innovations/companies that should exist in the market. This is in literally almost everyone's best interest - investors, public corp's, governments, consumer - only a small group of high-speed traders would disagree. Why this hasn't occurred yet is mind-boggling.

A little guy questioning a humongous pile of money empire (I doubt they'd feel it).

Why don't you provide object recognition on a large range of classes, like http://www.image-net.org/ for example, and millions of specific objects + ocr, like what google goggles provides http://www.google.com/mobile/goggles/

Your sdk is slow moving and limited for all the resources that your empire has at it's disposal.

So you don't provide source code, or condone linux access. Why is that, what do you fear?

This will get much easier when robocars come out. You won't have to worry about police and zoning laws, the car can move every once in a while or continuously be moving. If robocar renting takes off you don't even the cash up front to pay for one. Showers and toilets can be separately moving robocars so this can all be done in small vehicles rather than large RV's. The fuel would electric (robocars recharge themselves from electric gas stations) so the costs of all this would be minimal as well. If this all plays out well, apartments, and even houses should see a drop in value (a good thing because too much of wealth is being plowed into the unproductive economy of land owning - it can instead shift to purchasing engineered products).

You've made a lot of arguments along the line of "it's difficult difficult difficult" but haven't given a specific example of why it can't be done. What do you think of self-driving cars? That was difficult too, and basically the same kind of problem (autonomous navigation). In fact, it's probably easier than robocars since it's much emptier up there.

The hardest part is building satellites in space, which they haven't said they will do (but I think is possible, as described in the 1980 study).

This isn't as far fetched as it first seems. With Elon Musk's rockets they can get satellites to space cheaply, then map the asteroids with cameras, then send robotic satellites out to mine and send packages back to earth, or keep in space. They can create the satellites in space or on the moon in a kinematic self replicating manner.

http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm

See the NASA 1980 summer study.

There's an "out there" way to skirt all of that.

Google (or whoever else) could simply create their own suburbs/towns/cities from scratch, streamlined construction and all, on cheap land bought in bulk in the desert out west. Not everyone would move, but many people would, especially if it was all managed by what they perceive as a trustable tech-savvy company like google. The might even cost them nothing if they would simply ask for pre-sale deposits.

It's a crazy idea but there's nothing difficult technically or financially to make it happen. There's probably at least 1 million customers who would sign up day 1.

Once Walmart stocks it. This will easily take off once it's sold like normal printers at retail chains, even at moderately high price points.

Speed isn't the main aim of this. Industrial robotics has an arms race in speed and precision but this is instead a beginning of an arms race in "common sense" abilities, robots that can do the work of humans without specialized programming. It already seems to operate at human worker speed.

This isn't getting enough attention. They'll be releasing an sdk in a few months and hoping to start an "app store" like industry. This could potentially be the Netscape moment for service robotics (robots that take over retail shelf stacking, fast food, parts of nursing). Web/App developers should consider learning computer vision/machine learning and get in on this.

Yes, the robots should drive to your driveway in a bubble of sterility.

I'm not suggesting this happen by tommorrow, just that it is technically possible with the enough investment.

I'm just suggesting that when it comes to medical matters innovation is happening at a snails pace.

The aerospace industry manages to lose almost no lives, while the medical industry loses people left and right. There's something deeply wrong there.

Recently, Vinod Khosla suggested 80 percent of doctors are superfluous and medicine still operates in a voodoo magic kind of way for the most part.

I have to disagree a little there. There's been huge progress in communication but actual physical things (household robots or medical advances) not much. The linked-to articles (as well drones/robocars) show a beginning of a breakthrough in that sphere.

edit: I agree it's basically a continuation (cheaper) but you can say the same about internet (made in 60s but breakthrough in late 90s)

It's ending right about now

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/a-robot-with-a-del...

http://arxivindex.blogspot.ca/2012/09/new-form-of-universal-...

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/nanoelectronics-and-tissu...

The only real solution to healthcare is to reduce costs by eliminating hospitals/doctors altogether using big data/telerobotics/smartphones. Sadly, because of the AMA and FDA this innovation will have to occur offshore first.

Yeah, but what happens when your phone is google glass (could happen in 2 years). Style would end up be just the frame you can buy anywhere.