This means that they use mirrors to focus the light onto the panel. Since high-efficiency panels tend to be expensive, the more light you can concentrate on it, the better. The fact that it can handle a near 300 fold increase in throughput is a good thing. These are not going to be used on a residential roof flat panel anytime soon.

Two questions:
1. Why?
2. How?

If a brokerage clears transactions internally, that is more efficient than using an external exchange, and is a good thing.
Trying to outlaw or over-regulate dark pools will just push them underground, or more likely, overseas. That means less jobs for Americans, just to satisfy your pointless desire to ban something that you don't understand.

Wrong. These are not the only reasons. A third reason is that you are a market maker, an integral part of the exchange system, that matches up buyers and sellers. You, as an individual, cannot just log in to the NYSE computers and grep for a buyer to sell to. You have to execute your trade through the system, which has relied on middlemen for more than a century. In the old days, the middlemen were men in the pits exchanging paper. Today, nearly all trades are facilitated by HFTers. This is because they can offer a better price to both the buyer and the seller, by reducing the transaction cost.

They make money because their transactions costs are lower. Their transaction costs are lower because their risk is lower. Their risk is lower because they are holding the stock for a very short period of time. If the "hold time" is increased through legislation, the risk goes up, and the transaction costs go up.

They rake in far less than the old market makers that they replaced.

The money comes from reducing transaction costs, which comes from the reduced risk of holding the stock for a shorter period of time. The buyer wins. The seller wins. The HFTer wins. The old market making system loses.

This is flat out wrong. Transaction costs have gone down by an order of magnitude since HFT became common. Claiming that HFT increases costs doesn't even make sense. If that were true, why would anyone trade with them?

All the actual evidence says the opposite.

Nonsense. HFT reduces the spread, by reducing the risk inherent in holding the stock. If they didn't reduce the spread nobody would trade with them.

This is not research on normal "market making" HFT. It is only research on arbitrage, where it shows that slow traders lose to fast traders, which is already pretty obvious. But for a normal person buying or selling a stock, a market making HFTer is going to offer a better price. If fact, nearly all exchange transactions are executed by HFT, because they offer a better deal to both the buyer and the seller.

You seem to have a rather astonishing ignorance of how markets work. High Frequency Traders (HFTs) are not investors, they are market makers. They find a willing buyer and a willing seller, arrange the transaction, and execute the trade. They make a profit on the spread between the buy price and the sell price. The problem is that once they locate the buyer and seller, they need to buy the stock from the seller first, then turn around and sell it to the buyer, but the buyer may have cancelled the transaction, or they may have already bought the stock from someone else, in which case the HFT is stuck with the stock and may have to sell it to someone else at a loss. If transactions are granulated to even one second intervals, instead of say, millisecond intervals, then the risk of this happening is a thousand times higher, and the HFTs will insist on higher spreads, resulting in lower liquidity and higher transaction costs for both buyer and seller.

Since the introduction of high frequency trading, transaction costs have fallen considerably, saving plenty of people a lot of money. The only losers are the old market makers that used to have lucrative sweetheart deals with the exchanges. Many of those old market makers are now bankrupt. Good riddance.

What is your objection to high frequency trading? What is wrong with it? Other than people ranting about something they have made no effort whatsoever to understand, I haven't seen a single good argument against it. The advantages, to nearly everyone, seem pretty obvious to me.

Because the effect of that would be to push even more transactions into unregulated "dark pools". Why do you believe that HFT is harmful? Do you have any evidence, other than fear of something you don't understand? HFT has drastically lowered transaction costs, benefiting everyone except the traditional middlemen. HFT was blamed for some of the "flash crashes", but more thorough investigation has shown that HFT actually decreased volatility. One of the recommendations of the SEC's 2010 investigation was to find a way to keep HFTers active during periods of volatility. Perhaps even requiring them to actively trade in order to keep markets liquid.

Not true. In Africa, even the very poor often have phones. They can buy used phones for less than $5, which are often refurbished first-world throwaways. Phone services are very cheap, and in Africa, phones are a critical economic tool. "Minutes" on your phone are more inflation proof than the official currency, and peer-to-peer transactions are often possible. So even a farmer selling his produce by the roadside will find that a cellphone is an economic necessity. So if he has to choose between the phone and shoes for his kids, he will choose the phone. The shoes can come later.

I love a good conspiracy theory, but this Tea Party nonsense is just stupid. First, inflation hurts the wealthy (who tend to be creditors) far more than it hurts the poor (who tend to be debtors). Traditional champions of the poor, such as Williams Jennings Bryan, understood this, and fought against tight money policies that actually benefit the wealthy and hurt the poor, but that is exactly the opposite of what is happening today. Second, both interest rates and inflation have been near zero for years, so your assertion that they are inversely correlated is weak. Third, what do you suggest as an alternative to our current monetary policy? European style austerity? Several years ago America and Europe both had about 10% unemployment. Today, America is at 7.5% and Europe is near 12% ... and the euro has fallen against the dollar (again, the opposite of what your conspiracy theory predicts).

Yes, but the poster probably doesn't really know what he wants, and has probably never managed any sort of big project before. I have been working in the software industry for 30 years, and I can assure you that a "new guy" confronted with a complex system always recommends throwing everything away and starting over. But that is almost never the correct answer. Real world implementations don't look like the textbook examples that college students are used to, but doesn't make them "wrong". The existing implementation looks complex because it codifies hundreds of special business rules, such as discounts for the boss's friends, special commission arrangements with a particular salesperson, etc. You can't just throw out those rules, so you end up maintaining the old system simultaneously with trying to implement the new system. But your resources are split between these two tasks, so requests for fixes get backlogged, while the new implementation drags on for years. Meanwhile the "new guy" has left the company in frustration, and when the new ERP/CRM/WTF system is finally ready, it is a complete mess, and a fresh new guy recommends throwing it out and starting over. I have been around this loop many, many times.

It depends on who they are, and if investigators can find a link to any insiders. If it was Ben Bernanke's brother-in-law, then he will have some explaining to do.

Markets are never 100% fair, or 0% fair. So instead of focusing on perfection, we should be focusing on improvement. An obvious way to have made the market more fair in this case would have been to make the announcement after the markets were closed for the day. Another possibility would have been to halt trading for a few minutes before and after the announcement, for the news to settle. I suspect that the person responsible for making the decision to announce in the middle of the trading day was also someone who, directly or indirectly, benefited from the cheating. Cui bono?

01010111 01010010 01001111 01001110 01000111 00100001