Topic: So I met a guy who makes Algorithmic Trading Programs for High Frequency Trading - page 3. (Read 7298 times)

Not anymore.  I think I'll try to 'join them'.  All attempts to point out to the cow-people that they're being taken advantage of have been met with indigence and scorn.  I think I'll just pull up a stool and a bucket and start milking.

It's apparently what people want.  They don't feel useful unless they are being taken advantage of.

If they don't make money, why would they do it?

Making money everyday on markets is statistical improbability. Even the best day-traders have days on loses.

Free market is a code word for rigged market. Every empirical evidence suggest just that.

No one in his right mind promotes 'free market' so he exposes him-self to competition over basic resources needed to survive unless he is sure to win.

Tobin tax website? I guessing you are for this monstrosity?


I don't think he knows very much about markets then. As people make money from price changes, prices are smoothed out and reflect longer term pictures (HFT is short term however, longer term is for usual human investment).

It was at a political meet up group here in Portland.  I met a man who works for a company back east that works on writing Algorithms for automated trading systems.

The irony was that I was there trying to recruit people to help me build a Tobin Tax website.  What a small world.


He said the following:

Algorithmic trading is financial warfare.
Algorithmic trading is a financial arms-race.
It is really a form of 'scalping', and admitted that it serves no role whatsoever to anyone but the person doing the HFT
The average ratio of dollar-earned-to-dollar-lost is about 6-to-1, meaning that every 6 dollars they make they lose 1
He was working on an algorithm that was getting 30-to-1 and 40-to-1 ratios
He called the whole line of business a 'printing press'
He was a web-developer but sort of fell into this line of work, now he makes multiple times what he used to, he said there is nowhere else he could ever make the money he is now
It was clear he was making so much money writing short programs in visual pascal that it was probably over $100k, bare minimum, probably in the $100k to $200k range
But even what he was making paled in comparison to the true experts that work on algorithms for the biggest players (literal million dollar bonuses were given out)
He also told me that everyone he knows pays an incredibly low tax rate due to loopholes (18% for millionaires, etc)
He told me about a hedge fund managers plan to build an 'oil derrick' out in the mid Atlantic ocean (where there is no oil) directly over the fiber lines running between the Euro and London exchanges and the US just to get a 1/600th of a second lead on the rest of the market


I'm going back next week to learn more.  He laughed when I told him about the Tobin Tax plan, he said it would never work and that there are so many fortunes being made in this that there are literally armies of millionaires and billionaires that would oppose it.  I'm starting to believe him as the only 2 people that knew about HFT (High Frequency Trading) and algorithmic trading at that event were myself and him... and he worked for a company that did it.


Enjoy your 'free market'.