Here’s a comment from the site:
“...As far as I’m concerned high frequency trading should be banned ..The point of the markets is to facilitate investment not to act as a Casino, companies are now spending absurd amounts of money to out do one another with ridiculous technology to make “their “ trades first , that kind of behavior has no place outside of a casino....”
It’s not just the ability to place trades first. It’s knowing ahead of others what the trade will be. It’s front running and it is illegal.
When you can see the future before others in a bet, you have the inside advantage. It’s like knowing what cards the dealer is going to pull from the deck before other players know. This is all due to computer speed that is made possible by putting ultra fast servers as close to the floor trading as possible. Technically the HFT players get to peek at the answer before they place their bets.
Wall St. knows the retail investor is spent, wiped out, exhausted. But they need the retail investor to come back if they can ever kick the QE addiction of investment banks channeling QE funds to stocks. At some point the QE originated game has to end. Wall St. needs to lure retail bagholders back to their casino.
More than that, there’s a demographic problem going on for Wall Street.
The Baby Boomers are retiring, and that means they’re not going to be in equities (as a generation) for that much longer. They’re not in the job market for that much longer, and their IRA and 401(k) money is going to come out of stocks and into less volatile asset classes (eg, bonds, Treasury paper, etc).
The following generation is both numerically smaller, and has much less money to put into the markets. As it is, when I talk to young people, their distrust of large institutions absolutely applies to Wall Street, and they “know” that the markets are rigged. They’ve seen a huge melt-down in 2008. They’ve seen how the markets took 10+ years to regain where they were in the early 2000’s. They’ve heard of how the dot-bomb generation created IPO’s with absolutely no hope of ever making a profit, etc, etc.
There’s no way to convince these kids to invest in the markets. They have no trust in them at all - or even any trust in the concept. How do you tell a kid to “trust the markets” when they saw the US government turn itself inside-out to rescue the big banks... only to give the big bankers more power, more money and to screw everyone else in the markets and any savers who want only a few percent on their savings?
Wall Street is dancing on its own grave here.