No, no, no. "providing liquidity" is not a good thing unless liquidity is actually a problem almost everywhere people talk about this.
The "liquidity" provided by high-frequency traders in the stock market does not benefit anyone but themselves. For everyone else the difference between trading in minutes and hours (or even days) is near-meaningless. And they don't provide liquidity for seldom traded stocks.
And on the housing market they are not providing liquidity for the market in general. They are buying and then renting those properties out. Since they are all-cash offers they often trump "regular" buyers out of the market, even when offering the same price. Again, the only ones who benefit by this are those investors themselves.
These investors are one of the major forces pushing up the prices, the are part of the problem, not the solution.
That liquidity is also what's driving the price of executing a retail trade to or below zero. You used to have to pay fees whenever you bought or sold stock.
To be honest, I just figured they were able to eliminate fees by front running and/or selling my trading information.
You could make an argument of the form "HFTs have made trading so cheap that people are hurting themselves more than they used to, and we need to bring the price of trading back up so that people won't be tempted". But that is a pretty different argument than "HFTs don't provide any value". They clearly do. When you place an order to buy or sell stock, you pay lower fees and you get better prices than you otherwise would, because you look just like a million idiots.
Yes there’s a few rich in there and it’s not like they’re egalitarian, but it isn’t Jeff Bezos either.
absolutely. If anything investors provide for liquidity of the market.
The real issue is that investors, ie. the rich, are getting more and more ability to buy real estate while the middle and the low class are getting less and less capable of doing so. The reason is the huge sloshing amounts of money being given to the top, and thus those money causing a strong push for the price rise of the assets (back at the beginning of pandemic i said that it will result in the biggest redistribution of wealth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23924777 toward the rich and large ones)