|
There are definitely things wrong with financial markets, but automated trading is not one of them. Just like anything else, using computers to be more efficient is a good thing. Are you going to complain about Amazon and wait for 'real retail' to decouple? The problem with modern financial markets is that they have become quite abstract. Finance is maths, which means it's code, which means you start abstracting away from the implementation to get to a high level. Just because it's not immediately clear to a layperson what's going on, doesn't mean it's not useful or real. Imagine what would happen for most programmers if you tried to explain to a layperson what you do. "I'm a developer" "Oh, you make websites?" "Well, uh, no, you see, I make tools for making it easier to make websites" "Oh, like what?" "Um, well I make a compiler for turning one language into another" "Why?" "Well, when you make a website, you have to do all this stuff, but, well, you could do less stuff, just more clever, and then it's easier and you don't have to worry about for loops and such" "What's a for loop?" "Oh that doesn't matter. But now we can use a monadic map instead, which is much easier, developers don't want to write loops, map is better. But Javascript is a bit fiddly, so now I've written another language, so you can write in that, and then you run my tool, and then you get Javascript, so the browsers can understand it." "Oh, so the browser only runs Javascript?" "Yes. Well no. Actually most of them run some kind of JIT compiler, which turns javascript into another language, and then they run that" "So your language becomes another language which becomes another language? Why not just write the other one?" "Well, because that's not really what we want to do, it's awkward, and inefficient, and bug-prone..." "But your language isn't a real thing? No-one's actually using it? My computer never gets it, never runs it, never understands it? Shouldn't you be doing real development?" |