Re:What Business is Wall Street In?
by digikata on Friday September 21, 2012 @12:11PM
(#4554309)
By demanding automation, HFT drives down the operational cost of a particular transaction. However, for trades themselves, it's arguable that it drives up the cost of the overall transaction for long-term traders - especially those who end up needing to break up a larger overall stock transactions into smaller batches.
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I find it hard to believe the overhead of doing that comes to more than $.24/share.
It does mean the market demands more knowledge; it's more sensitive now, so you can no longer do a buy or sell "at market" and expect a good price. But even if you don't know how to play the market you can go through a broker and still pay far less than you would've in the "good old days".