Is The U.S. Stock Market Rigged?
The transcript of the entire interview can be found on the 60 Minutes site. However, I had trouble getting their embedded videos to play in Chrome.
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Collective Motion Of Stocks With And Without HFT
I came across these two videos by Austin Gerig of the Said Business School at Oxford. One of his specialities is the impact of HFT upon markets and the videos below represent the price movements of 40 large-cap US stocks in 1-minute interval without HFT and with HFT. You notice that with HFT there is…
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The Woes of Wall Street: Why Young Bankers Are So Miserable?
Who gives a shit is the only response I could think of to the implied question. If you are naive enough to believe that working in the finance industry is the same as doing charitable work in Africa then you are profoundly deluded.
Take One Step Forward And Two Steps Back.
Once again Michael Pascoe gets it right. I worked in broking for years and two things amazed me. Firstly, how little brokers know about markets. They have a lot of platitudes in their sales arsenal but very few have a deep understanding of how the market actually works. Secondly, it is the most self interested…
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High Speed Traders Trade Faster Than Low Speed Traders
The title is somewhat obvious but it hides a deeper point – there is an arms race going on the trading world and generally you are not part of it. I have had numerous discussions about the impact of HFT with various people, some of whom insist naively that the benefits and technology of HFT…
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Wall Street Attracts Chop Shops 20 Years After ‘Wolf’
The concept of a chop or bucket shop is nothing really new, nor were they restricted to the US. Jessie Livermore makes reference to them at the early part of the 20th century and when I first started in broking there were still some futures and OTC option bucket shops still operating. I dont know…
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QOTD
I was preparing a piece for the Australian Investors Association when I came across this quote. The story telling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is…
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