It's actually a flawed analogy. What you're simply pointing out is that there are inefficiencies in a particular market. Faster time to market eliminates these inefficiencies. The guy with the slower connection simply can not use the old tried and true strategy of arbitrage.

Here's the breakdown.

If the price of gold is 1$ in San fran, but NY is buying it at 1.5$, that is an arbitrage, you can buy in San fran and sell in NY. It means the market of gold is currently inefficient. In the old days, you could be that truck driver that picks up 1.5 tons of gold at 1$ and sell it in NY at 1.5$. Later someone built a train line that made the trip faster and just obsoleted the truck driver. In the future someone invents a teleportation machine and obsoletes the train. Regardless of the situation, the market will see less arbitrage situations as the technology improves.

There are certainly wrongs with HFT, but eliminating arbitrage is not one of them.

I see alot of comments with people assuming that you can no longer taste the food if one adds alot of hot sauce to it

I'd simply have to say that it's personal preference in taste. I like it real spicy, my wife doesn't, who am I to say that she doesn't know what she's eating?

It's much akin to salt, some can take it real salty, some can't, who am I to say they're wrong


but onto more constructive topics there are a few things I love to do with really hot chilis. I've got some fresh and dried haberneros, ghost chilis and jalapenos growing / drying in the greenhouse. This hot summer was awesome as the chilis came out potent, plump very ripe.

my favorite things to do with the ghost chilis is to make a nice pico de gallo. Fresh tomatoes, cilantro, onions, lime, and small amount of fresh ghost chilis, salt and sugar to taste. For those who acutally like a more "green pepper" taste, fresh jalapenos instead of ghost chilis work out very well.

In terms of sauces where I'm more interested int he spice and not the flavor of the pepper (ie only ghost chili as it really does sting enough that you don't get a pepper flavor out of it) I love using molasses:
Imho there is nothing better than a properly made molasses based hot sauced made with some ghost chili. The heat sneaks up on you much later as the sauce binds to the capcasin and releases slowly around the taste buds giving you the ability to taste the food and feel the burn as it goes down.

A homemade recipe i've been toying with involves:
Butter, Molasses, Tomato paste, salt, freshly ground garlic, freshly ground ginger, freshly ground onions, pork stock and reduce everything together. The butter is the secret to binding with the capsaicin so that it releases slowly. You get a rich, thick sauce that binds great with meats for bbqing, enhances the flavors of bland birds like turkey and chicken and allows you to acutally taste your food before the sucker burns all the way down.

That is just way too general of an assumption about what one does with a computer.

The same analogy would go for CPUs, why doesn't everyone just get by on a Pentium 4 or an Athlon X2? Both are perfectly acceptable, but honestly, I want my computer to be like my phone. Near 0 load/processing times which means more time doing what I care about and less time waiting for the machine doing stuff it cares about.

in that respect, I'll happily fork over 200$ for a small SSD/

it's a SATA interface regardless, why does it matter if it's for the "desktop" or the "laptop".

do you know of have 3.5" SSDs?

I'm using the seagate momentus and it came witha 3.5" mounting bracket

if Lucas123 can answer that question, he'll find his answer.

If they're goint o pick an arbitrary number, why even make it so complicated.

they should just say 1 AU = 42 and be done with it.

TL:DR

create a new company and sell the assets to the new entity for 1$

done.

Plus interest and time value lost and potential value of data stored now that the service you paid full price for is no longer available.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/08/written-in-dna-code.html?ref=hp dna archiving.

Unfortunately that's not the way it works, this is a very efficient market. Would you pay 10$ for a steam game if it could be had for 3.99$?

take your example with the apple seller

The apple grower (seller) takes product to a market place (NYSE) and says I'm going to sell it for 5c per apple, the ask.
To create a market, the Market Maker like Knight will now put in a bid for 4 c because that is their purpose, to create liquidity in a market place.
Now we have 2 choices. the seller can decide to sell that apple to the Market maker for 4c or he can just wait around until a Buyer comes in and buys it from him at 5c.

Choice 1: the seller sells it to Knight at 4c. Knight now owns the risk on the apple potentially falling further but in the mean time, the Original seller sold his apple and has none left. Knight will now put an offer , the ask, on the apple they bought for say 4.5 cents (to help move it faster). They will also at the same time lower their Bid in case more apples are for sale down to 3c.

Choice 2: Another buyer comes in and buys the apple from teh seller at 5c. The buyer gets his apple at 5c, the seller sells at 5c. The market maker is completely not involved in this transaction. What the market maker will do though, is now set a sell price at 6c to create a market place.

Now where the market maker potentially can overstep a smaller investor is that the market maker obviously knows the best prices since they're making the market and see what's out there. if they are desperate to dump the apple they bought at 4c and try and sell it at 4.5c and another individual seller comes in at 4.4c, the algorhythm may then say "shit the market is moving down, look for the best price I can sell my position at" If a buyer steps in at 4 cents, the algo will automatically offload the position before the seller can make that decision. But that's why you have things called limit orders or market orders. Limit makes sure you get what you want if the price moves the way you want.

the exchange in all of this is simply a market place. They are not the middle men. They provide for you a service where you have a market place to trade your goods and charges you for the right to trade on the exchange. Much like if you were in a farmers market, you'd have to rent the particular stall.

let me know what Enron trades at right now if you think my 0/1 example is unrealistic.

how about worldcom? let me know what the price of those are.

Btw if you still wish to buy Enron stock at a reasonable price, let me know =)

what you are talking about is front running and that is illegal.

The sec will absolutely fine you a rather large sum of money if you try that.

Look up the definition of a market maker. It is not a random term I threw around.

The market makers make a spread as a commission for offering liquidity to a particular market place. In your apple example, if the farmer grows an apple at 5 cents, and there is no middle man to deliver it to you, are you implying that you still should be entitled to pay only 5 cents for the same apple?

nono I made a mistake with that last post which is why i tried to reply to myself.

the 440 mm is real, every single trade that attributed to that 440mm will not be unwound by NYSE.

it already took into account all of the trades that NYSE has said would be canceled, which is the 6 stocks where the trades executed +/- 30% opening price.

acutally no,

after an hour when that info has desiminated, there would be a bid of 0$
and the ask would probably be 1$

In an efficient market where news is suppose to hit the fans at the same time, you'd basically have shut down liquidity for that entire period.

If trading in miliseconds you have smaller "steps" as people will let you "tick" the price all the way down to 0.