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by kortilla 1313 days ago
> high level gambling

This is a weasel phrase. Insurance is high level gambling as well. They both use risk models to decide at what price they will sit on the opposite side of a trade for.

Decide where you really draw the line and if it’s time horizons that’s pretty arbitrarily stupid. Insurance uses re-insurance quite quickly to de-risk their own books so pretending trading within a minute vs daily/hourly is pretty silly.

Also, most “fintech” is not the “be the fasted to arb 2 exchanges” variety. It’s usually “be a market maker for products that you can relatively quickly price based on proprietary signals”. If speed is your only advantage, the cat and mouse game will wake you up one day getting beat to the order book on every trade.

> and its pretty clear that fintech here sure doesn't mean the classical bank and modern "normal" payment system...

Not sure where you got that from. All of this is interconnected. The “classical banks” are all participating in deep fast moving bond markets. JPM doesn’t send their orders to some old timey trader with a cigar and a bowler hat via telephone. They use fintech like the rest of the industry.

1 comments

You didn't want to understand me. Sure both use risk models, but exactly this still doesn't make them anyhow relatable? And sure I know still that everything is interconnected, but it is clear that if someone complains about fintech (but other arguments then immediately go into the "oh you say fintech, but what about .."), he doesn't mean the necessary stuff like payments processing or normal markets. anyway fine to disagree here ;)
No, I’m saying your hand-wavy “fintech is bad” doesn’t actually point to any thing in particular. Most of HFT is not “do the same thing as the other players, but faster”.