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by lifeslogit 1974 days ago
That is very interesting to hear! I imagined that this was the perfect storm for HFT. Lots of retail investors using default exchange routing settings via brokers like Robinhood and ETrade that sell their order flow. Meanwhile these retail investors are buying small amounts of very volatile equities! Lots of opportunity to rack up lots of pennies.
1 comments
dumbfounder 1974 days ago
So RobinHood is stealing information from the poor to give to the rich? To make them richer? Surely I am not the first to notice this irony.
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derefr 1974 days ago
To stretch the analogy, the equivalent of an HFT firm in English folklore would probably be a toll-road operator; or a city-state customs officer accepting lesser private bribes in place of levying greater official tariffs on imported goods.

Robin Hood, by stealing from the rich and giving to the poor (in a period with commodity currency with no monetary policy), would be encouraging deal-flow (as the rich traders stolen from need to send the same goods again to fulfill their contracts; and the poor now have money to spend to purchase exotic goods, requiring more be imported by traders), in turn increasing travel on the toll-road/through the customs office, in turn making the toll-road operator/customs officer money. It would make perfect sense for the mythical Robin Hood to, in fact, be a toll-road operator/customs officer — or at least to be in cahoots with them.

(In fact, come to think of it, he wouldn't even need to steal from the rich, per se. He could just destroy trade caravans, and collect a cut of the revenue from the toll-booth operators; or destroy goods already imported but not yet sold, and collect a cut from the customs office; and then distribute said cut to the poor. The same virtuous(?) cycle would occur.)

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WorldMaker 1974 days ago
Yeah, RobinHood and Citadel Securities (that has been backing most of the options trades here) aren't at all the good guys either. Almost all of Wall Street is a money shuffle, and the "free" trades at retail had plenty of hands skimming the pot and making their own profits.
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