<story><title>High Frequency Trading and Finance&apos;s Race to Irrelevance</title><url>http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/high-frequency-trading-and-finances-race-to-irrelevance/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kiyoto</author><text>I want to shed some light on this topic. As a former HFT quant, I find the general &amp;quot;Main Street&amp;quot; sentiment toward the profession to be misguided.&lt;p&gt;1. HFT does NOT take anything from most investors most of the time. Most investors trade on a much longer investment horizon than any HFT firm. If you are a normal investor, you can lump up most of HFTs into the same bucket as the exchange itself. Most of them engage in some combinations of (i) pure arbitrage (ii) very short-termed statistical arbitrage (iii) market-making based on (i) and (ii). None of this is really that relevant to most investors. The only time HFTs can screw over a lot of investors is when their software goes awry. But this is a risk that any computerized system has, high frequency or not. If there is a major bug in Chicago Mercantile Exchange&amp;#x27;s matching engines, that would be a total disaster.&lt;p&gt;2. HFT firms do have huge execution risks: if you are making a two-sided market, there is a chance you can get &amp;quot;swept&amp;quot;, meaning when the value of the underlying moves faster than you can react, you get filled on one side of the order without a realistic chance of hedging for a profit. HFT firms do a ton of research into estimating their execution risks. (edit: This point is often glossed over, making HFTs look like this evil superpower group of nerds exploiting other investors. That&amp;#x27;s not the case)&lt;p&gt;3. Finally, most HFT traders don&amp;#x27;t go into the profession solely for the money, just like most people do not apply for YC solely for their passion. Most of my former coworkers weren&amp;#x27;t that greedy and led pretty modest lives despite making hundreds of thousands of dollars. For them, high frequency trading had a locally optimal balance of tackling intellectually challenging problems while getting paid handsomely.&lt;p&gt;I won&amp;#x27;t say HFT is the most valuable thing that its practitioners can be doing. I think the (trading) world would operate just fine without all these micro-second level transactions. But they are NOT the next subprime mortgage, and I just hope folks stop commenting on stuff they have no clue about.</text></comment>
<story><title>High Frequency Trading and Finance&apos;s Race to Irrelevance</title><url>http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/06/high-frequency-trading-and-finances-race-to-irrelevance/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>minikites</author><text>&amp;gt; What Lewis’s book demonstrated to me isn’t just how “bad” HFTs are per se, but rather, what happens when finance keeps walking down the path it seems to be set on — a path that involves abstracting itself from the creation of real-world value. The final destination? It will enter a world entirely of its own — a world in which it is fighting to capture value that is completely independent of whether any is created in the first place.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d say the financial markets have been there for 6-8 years already.</text></comment>