rrrrsss99

No, only one order was legitimate. They placed an ask at the top level and then placed 3 bids below the top level. As soon as someone hit the ask, they cancelled the bids. The bids made it look like the market was going up. If the top level bid had been hit first, they still would have cancelled

Markets already are unpredictable. Spoofing is the equivalent of running an auction on ebay and submitting bids yourself under fake accounts to drive up the price to trick the one person who actually wants it into paying more.

Are there ways to optimize personal income taxes the same way corporations do? Can I create a shell person in the cayman islands and pay them the exact amount of my income and deduct my US income to $0?

Were you buying these options throughout they year, or just near earnings?

Add in all of the people who have found God and I guess the story checks out

After $2500 for administration, there's just enough for a new aircraft carrier

Not really. Most of the population is near the middle and doesn't care how you label them. People on the fringes are loud. That's all you're hearing.

"we suffered through that horrific administration"

Thousands of Americans died and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's and Afgani's died. You obviously weren't one of them. Your weren't part of that. You went to college and lived your life in peace, but somehow you suffered as much as the people who watched their families die and their countries fall apart because your "conscience hurt".

What about the alternative of building up wealth? It's the conservative view, but if you get to 30 or 40 with significant assets, you have a lot more flexibility to explore what you want without worrying about money. With the supply demand curve favoring devs for the time being, why not jump from job to job taking the compensation increase each time? I think my 2-3 year stints will catch up to me at some point, but if I have 1-2m in liquid assets, I think I'll have a much wider set of means than if I had optimized for experience. You'll still fail and learn, but you'll be sitting on cash instead of worthless options

I think this is kind of an unrealistic view of startups that's been championed a lot. I'll concede that I only have 4 data points (4 jobs), but when I worked at a startup, my responsibilities were much more limited and defined than where I am now (200+ people, 80 IT). A lot of that was due to cycling through management styles like scrum and kanban, but this is to be expected at startups that haven't figured out what works for them yet and want to copy everyone else. I also think I've learned a lot more at my current company than at my startup where I was surrounded by "fake it to you make it" people. I value the network I've built up there more too. Before you jump into that circus, look at the middle. It's not startup or 5000 person company. There are plenty of established companies in the 50 - 300 person range that are nice places to work and to learn and pay market rates. I was able to jump into trading from there and get 2-3x market rates

Vanguard runs etfs mostly, so I'm not sure why they care about support small spreads since they probably do a lot of efp trades (I'm not sure how the underlying prices are determined, but I think they can convert at a set price). The mutual funds and hedge funds who are more fundamental will try and buy or sell large blocks, so they're more affected by adverse market moves from trying to dump $1M of apple. I could see VG's attitude change a little since there are more traders engaged in rebalancing arb. If you know that the S&P index has to allocate more money to a certain stock, you can buy it ahead of time and sell to VG for a slightly higher price. If you're a passive fund with $1B in an etf, everyone knows what you're obligated to do. It's basically stat arb with higher probability. I still buy VG funds though

I think it put several hundred people out of work at nyse and nasdaq who were also charged with colluding for $.50 tick size. They went quietly. The repercussions have come from institutional investors and banks who we're used to putting in 100,000 lot orders without the market moving against them. I do see some wrath coming from drivers too. The companies they're pissed at are too well known though. People will still see google and tesla as inovators and get behind them

I think it's inaccurate to put hft in the future tech division with darpa or porn. Maybe it will lead to fpga's/c++/microwaves being widely used for ML, but it seems unlikely that the low latency and minimal cross country transmission has has much value. If you're building a system to process lots of data quickly transmitting a few bytes between the UK and Belgium slightly faster than a wire won't be a constraint. Maybe it will lead to real time instance based learning, but I'm not aware of anyone going in that direction

Not exactly in all products. US equities exchanges have to comply with the nbbo (national best bid offer), so they're required to forward an order to the exchange with the best price. This isn't true for futures, but there aren't any fungible futures in the US. This means that latency arb in US equities isn't true arbitrage. If you see a price level get sweeped at one exchange, you may guess that the others will follow, but it's no guarantee and most sophisticated traders who trade the volume to do this will trade in a dark pool or block trade, so the opportunities are close to non existent. The intent for equities market making is to trade retail orders with the assumption that they they're placed with no knowledge of a true price and won't move the market. The true arb opportunities today are reserved to minis vs futures or cross exchange futures vs indexes

An interesting data point in the hft rigged market debate I never see is, what do the insiders do with their money? I work at an electronic market maker that trades on colocated servers with fpgas and rents bandwidth on microwaves, so we without a doubt fall under the hft umbrella. My 401k is 100% invested in index funds and my personal brokerage account is split between 80% vanguard index etfs and a few stocks (that I probably shouldn't have invested in, but I didn't know what I was doing when I got started). This is similar to my coworkers and people I know at other firms. Why would we do this if we were knowingly rigging the market against retail investors? To answer my own question, if you're an investor, the microstructure of the exchanges is irrelevant. When I put in an order to by 100 shares of VTI, I'll put in a limit order after the close a half percent above the closing price knowing that it will be sold to citadel or another internalizer who will fill the order at a good price (nbbo, debatable since they're being investigated currently) and take the penny or two spread. I could put in a limit for the close, but either I wouldn't get filled or if I did, it would only be due to the market moving against me and honestly the difference doesn't matter. I have no intent to sell at a particular profit point or watch a screen all day to find some imagined perfect entry point which I wouldn't even know if I saw it. I'm interested to hear if opponents of hft have considered this or think insiders are behaving differently. I won't make the argument that we're looking out for the little guy or we have some mission to benefit society through price discovery. We basically print money when the market goes down, but we're so far removed from the average person that I can only assume that the hatred is based on marketing and false perception.