| > I was going to mention HFT. How is it a level playing field when they are in the picture? Paying top dollar just to be closer and closer to the exchanges to get the fastest, "best price", when really, they have info before anyone else. Apologies if my post implied insider knowledge on the part of HFTs. That's not the case. The point I was making is their model is ONLY viable if they have the best mathematical brains, the best computing power, the best connectivity. If anything in that fragile chain is broken then their model is unviable. In the end, they trade on what is best described as noise. They look for patterns in the noise. And so they need "the best" noise, as soon as instantly as they can get it, and the computing power to process it as close to instantly as possible. I called it "another story" because its a truly nuts way of making money. ;-) There is an old saying. "Time in a trade is better than timing a trade". HFTs are basically trying to do the latter all day, every day. In my view, John Doe the buy & hold investor actually has the advantage that they can wait for weeks, months or years. Tortoise & Hare and all that .... |