[mer10z]

I can't help but think of that article yesterday about how we're avoiding the Big Problems (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8261098). It's crazy how much money and brain power people have invested in HFT which is essentially just turning time into money with no benefit to society. What could the human race have achieved if the same amount of effort was focused in other areas?

[kasey_junk]

There are a lot of misconceptions in your comment that we need to unpack.

1) there isn't that much money in HFT. It has an ever decreasing number of players working for an ever decreasing amount of profit. Other areas of finance such as hedge funds, traditional investment banks, and derivatives creation are much bigger and have just as many "smart" people working in them. Don't get me started on advertising...

2) HFT doesn't turn time into money. It buys & sells risk in the form of liquidity. One way that it does this more efficiently is by being able to get in and out of positions fast.

HN, predictably, has a huge bias towards the capital raising/allocation side of the financial markets, but this is not why most participants are involved. Hedging risk is another huge (probably bigger) reason the markets exist. HFT allow that risk to be hedged more cheaply and more predictably so they provide value to the rest of the market.

[fchollet]

It could be that our current economic system implements a pretty terrible resource allocation algorithm, where many workers' jobs consist in undoing the efforts of employees from concurrent companies.

In trading, a quant's job is to outsmart or outspeed the other bank's team. They invest considerable brain power, effort and money into producing incremental improvements that are quickly rendered meaningless by the work of the team in the building across the street.

Another prime example is advertising, a zero-sum game where competing brands fight to undo other brands' brainwashing efforts and replace it with their own brainwashing. A waste of the time and energy of million of humans.

Some more ideas on the subject: http://www.sphere-engineering.com/blog/15-hour-work-week.htm...

[Retric]

Advertizing and HFT are only zero sum for competing products in an established market. For new products it can be a net benifit ex: "talk to your doctor about ED."

[afafsd]

Don't be mad that some other people's brains are bent on stuff of no particular benefit to you. Their brains, their choice.

Just be glad that some people's brains are bent on stuff of benefit to you, and concentrate, if you like, on what of general benefit you can do with your own brain.

[crdoconnor]

The economy is geared towards playing such zero sum games. This is pretty much by design - policies such as austerity, ZIRP and financial deregulation shift the allocation of capital to speculation (gambling) and away from productive investment.