Liquidity that brings with it random, often unexplained volatility... But yes, I would probably buy the brick, and can understand why people lucky enough to have colo servers do this.
I was going to make the same point. At lower timescales, things look very different. Also the number of orders, cancels and corrects has exploded in the last couple of decades, purely because of algorithmic speculation. This makes the market significantly less transparent, and the weird and wonderful matching algorithms employed by exchanges often get gamed by colo'd traders with the relevant knowledge.
I don't understand what you mean about "lucky". Anybody can. I have had a rack of colo servers which I use for personal stuff for the last 15 years. In an AWS world it's in some ways absurd, but some things are easier this way.
Precisely, and money isn't the only factor here. Your contacts, your firm's contacts and your trade volumes (amongst other things) can get result in you getting preferential treatment.
As someone who works in the industry I've found that analogies are distinctly unhelpful. That's not really unique to finance [0]. Can you explain what you mean by "literally wiggles them out"? I cannot say that I have observed a phenomenon that I would describe with those words, but I'm always interested in learning more.
That increase in volatity pushes prices up and down without real logic behind, in the short term, causing the small retail pundits to hit their conservative stop losses and take them out of the market. That's what I meant by "wiggle them out". Does that make sense?
Thank you for clarifying. You're talking about retail speculators getting "stopped out".
Do you have a reference showing that is happening with increasing frequency due to HFTs? It runs counter to my intuition because HFTs lead to less "gappy" markets and markets that respond to news events more quickly. For the purposes of this comment I will assume that this is true.
Is the amount that retail speculators lose to increased frequency of getting stopped out greater than the amount they gain from tighter markets? I don't have a clear opinion on this.
Is the net loss to retail speculators greater than the net gain to all other market participants? I suspect not because retail speculators are such a tiny portion of the market.
If this kind of volatility has increased with HFTs, it's caused by an overly small tick size. Markets will go back to how they were if you increase the tick size back to 1/16 of a dollar. This wouldn't help price takers other than retail speculators, but that's how you fix it if it really is a problem.