You're more average than you thought you were.

And ain't nothing really wrong with that.

I'm expressing serious concern about d_r's stability here

What am I, twelve? Go peddle that horseshit somewhere else.

Are you melting down? I'm really not interested in seeing something horrific about you on the news.

The sad thing is, you used to be better than this. Mind you, if freaking Rush Limbaugh goes to shit thanks to Obama's election, what I should I expect from mere mortals?

So in that sense this is the most elegant natural solution.

My only experience is with charter. Their service itself is usually pretty good, but I hate their website. You can't find straightforward information on what individual services cost, and even finding a channel listing is difficult. On more than one occasion I've searched for services available at my house--where they make me enter my exact address--and their website tells me that they do not service my area.

It really frustrates me that the companies that run the internet don't care enough or aren't required to make basic information about their services available.

is there really any reason to worry about this at all?

Less a worry and more a position on the risk/reward curve.

Hi. Organic farmer here.

The term organic is meaningless, and is as much a marketing tool as anything else. Buying organic food without checking out ingredients/growing methods is as stupid as not checking the provenance of anything else.

Having said that, there are many methods of protecting your crops that do not involve complex pesticides and other "highly unfriendly to certain types of living organisms" products. Really, it all boils down to whether you're lazy, or really want to produce and eat food that isn't going to do you or your environment any extra harm.

So do a little research before you buy. There's plenty of us growing this way and we're happy to detail exactly what we do and don't do to our food. Just ask.

actually fit in your pocket

If you're a munchkin, sure. My 3GS (no case) fits neatly into the fob pocket of my Levis.

Good point. Get two.

Why would you say that? All they need to do is patent the technology then collect royalties and/or licensing agreements.

The joke is that every time Sony's tried that gambit in the past, they failed miserably. Betamax and Minidisc are two great examples of this.

You seem to have a lot of animosity- did you post in this thread to just have a circlejerk about how obviously bad HFT is? Or have a reasoned and informed discussion?

Maybe my reading comprehension is off- here is your second sentence: And none of them benefited society in any respectable proportion to what they earned. So why should society infrastructure be modified to suit them (exclusive order types on exchanges regulated of necessity) ?

You don't even know how much they earned, so how can you really comment on it? Virtu Financial recently filed an S-1 to go public: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/e... Total revenue: $664 million. Net revenue: $182 million. Not bad, but not exactly killing it either.

What are you talking about with "society infrastructure", and particularly "exchanges regulated of necessity?" What does that even mean? Did you know that NYSE, amongst many other liquidity venues, is now a publicly traded company? The exchanges have provided these order types of their own volition, this isn't an "HFT" problem, its an exchange problem if anything- they are trying to attract the HFT flow to their exchanges!

As for "off the shelf" and "more difficult", it is nuanced. There are many components that are required to build a trading engine, major pieces of them can now be bought- low latency market data (Exegy), low latency network cards (Mellanox/Solarflare), and exchange connectivity, for example. There is now a critical mass of developers who can build this stuff for you, as opposed to this being arcane research type stuff. However, its all rather expensive. Co-location itself will cost you $10k/month per rack last I looked into it. Hence the "high barrier to entry" and "off the shelf" go together. 15-20 years ago, a boiler-room type phones and brokers operation might only have startup overhead (outside of employees) in total of $10k per month. The costs of some of this stuff will come down as it becomes commoditized, but bandwidth and datacenter space are likely to remain a sparse resource and remain costly.

As for whether this new technology is benefitting anyone, I would argue this is just a luddite argument that has been made many times before whenever there has been a disruptive new technology. Do you think the guys on the floor of the NYSE used to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for their seat because they liked going to Champs Deli or because they could wear a funny colored blazer? They did it so they could trade on information first. Telephones disrupted the bucket shops, SOES bandits disrupted the floor traders, later electronic trading completely disrupted floor trading, and now we have a bunch of guys who realized that they could build much faster infra and make money off it, and they did, forcing others to beef up their systems to keep up. And most have.

I am not spouting off anything- I spent the last ten years building this stuff on both the HFT and Agency side. You read a few articles, and maybe the entire Flash Boys book? Good for you. I am trying to give you the rest of the story.

You don't understand why dark pools were created in the first place. They originally came about so that institutional players, mutual funds, pensions, hedge funds, etc, could move large amounts of stock without tipping their hand. If Vanguard has its hand tipped that its selling all of it shares of say IBM in a large fund, that stock is going to plummet, and Vanguard is going to take a loss. This is called market impact. So dark pools were created where these large buyers and sellers could come together and trade large blocks of stock at once, and in the process they would also eliminate exchange fees and trade at the midpoint instead of eating the spread.

This was loved by the big players as they could easily move into and out of big positions- meaning that your pensions and mutual funds are now getting better prices and aren't getting taken advantage of in the lit markets.

The "price" is still the price for everyone, and you can not trade at a worse price than the NBBO- National Best Bid Offer. An HFT participant would have a field day if they were able to sniff out that large movements were going down. Many traders did this form or "tape reading" in the Bad Old Days you seem to be want to go back to.

This is not true, at least not for B/D owned dark pools. You could not buy real colocated access to those venues. You can buy other products to get low latency links into brokers, but you can't buy a direct route into a dark pool, at least not one owned by any of the b/d's I worked at, but I am unaware of any other B/Ds doing this either.

They just transferred profits from one group of guys that were making fairly easy money, collapsed the profit margin and concentrated that money into a fairly smaller group of people- so I think that they actually did benefit society. Though I would ask you why all actions have to benefit society? Does a gambler going to a casino benefit society? Does someone who goes to a restauarant? How about about someone who takes a weekend trip away from the city?

I am not sure what you are getting at about raising the barriers to entry. Technology has in general raised the barriers to entry for opening up a brokerage firm. It used to be that you needed phones, sales reps, a clearing firm and someone down on the floor to open a brokerage, and that was about it. These days everything is electronic and it is more difficult to do so. That technology needs to be reasonably good as well. To be competitive these days, the technology is commoditized, you can buy many pieces off the shelf.

The window for the glory days of HFT has closed. People caught on to them, and caught up. I wouldn't get too caught up in the storyline that a few geniuses almost took over the world. In 2008, I heard of several firms doing really stupid slow things- database accesses of security information in the critical path for instance.