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Re:Insights into High Frequency Trading from the Virtu IPO [... by anigbrowl on Thursday May 04, 2017 @06:14PM (#14269336)
I don't buy this argument, whose implicit corollary is that there can never be too much liquidity. I'm not an expert and don't have an opposing theory, nor do I want to do a bullshit refutation by just citing something I found in a few seconds on Google, but:

I feel there must be some ideal level of liquidity, which is after all subject to laws of supply and demand like everything else. Cannot an oversupply of liquidity result in fiscal inflation, as opposed to the monetarist kind? I'm reminded of the Asian financial crisis during the 1990s, when there was a ton of money flowinginto newly-developing markets int eh Asian region, but then a spasm of political uncertainty suddenly led to a catastrophic withdrawal.

Echoing one of the other posters here, I don't feel that anyone at this firm or the firm itself is acting in bad faith, but assuming this mathematical demonstration is correct and it's virtually impossible for Virtu to lose money other than by abandoning its winning strategy, does this not invite an arms race and a stampede of eager traders hoping to also get rich by picking up pennies from in front of steamrollers?

I don't want to say you're wrong, but to question the applicable scope of your premise. Virtu itself may not be big enough to cause market instability, but 100 firms doing the same thing might.

Re:Insights into High Frequency Trading from the Virtu IPO [... by tptacek on Thursday May 04, 2017 @07:15PM (#14269713)
I apologize for repeating a point I just made, but I'll make it here too:

You can mentally substitute "cost of trading" for "liquidity".

It's true that you can get costs down to a point where they don't matter. But I think you'll have an easier and more intellectually honest time engaging with the issue if you avoid the jargon and focus on the impact of the jargon. Cost is why we care about liquidity. As markets get less liquid, spreads increase, and the market takes inflicts more and more of a penalty on us for trading at all.

Re:Insights into High Frequency Trading from the Virtu IPO [... by anigbrowl on Thursday May 04, 2017 @07:46PM (#14269918)
I get this. I just have an intuition that some friction in a dynamic system is actually a good thing, and also wonder if the growth of HFT might not lead to an unsustainable deviation from an underlying power law distribution of trading activity.
Re:Insights into High Frequency Trading from the Virtu IPO [... by bovine3dom on Friday May 05, 2017 @03:51AM (#14271798)
You have reminded me of an excellent article on frictional costs in economics from The Economist [1]. There is a slight snag in that it is an April Fools joke.

[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21719799-it-time-recog...

Re:Insights into High Frequency Trading from the Virtu IPO [... by mathperson on Thursday May 04, 2017 @07:30PM (#14269812)
I think are pretty large barriers to entry to hft. You need enough capital to develop a sophisticated, heavily error checked trading strategy, set up your own network to ensure low latency, the IT infrastructure/engineers to manage this,.. it's not like a few burnt out traders can open up hft firm in their garage so I think any stampede is unlikely