The following article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal is a great follow up to my post from yesterday, Computers on Wall Street are Buying and Selling to Themselves!. Mark Cuban, who wrote software himself, may have a bit more knowledge on the matter than some D.C. prostitute regulator, so I am sure they have contacted him to get his thoughts on the matter. As I have said for years now, when the public loses all faith in their “leaders”(corporate and political), they lose faith in the system itself. No economy can ever dynamically grow and increase standards of living absent a belief in the rule of law. This is precisely why the U.S. will never be a strong, vibrant and upstanding society again until we take out our own trash, rather than pointing fingers abroad and blasting drones at civilians from 10,000 feet.
Key quotes from Mark Cuban on the computer dominated stock market:
I came to realize that the stock market no longer knew what business it was in. I wrote a blog that basically said that the markets for equities of all kinds had evolved to a platform for hackers.
As far as narrowing spreads, that’s absolutely true, but in absolute terms what does it translate into? For the individual investor it might save them a quarter a month. So what? Relative to the risk that’s the worst tradeoff in the history of tradeoffs (more…)