Quote from: tomcollins on July 07, 2011, 07:05:49 PM

Quote from: niemivh on July 07, 2011, 05:32:33 PM

Quote from: tomcollins on July 05, 2011, 10:30:19 PM

Quote from: Hawker on July 04, 2011, 02:33:29 PM

Quote from: tomcollins on July 04, 2011, 01:39:30 PM

Quote from: niemivh on July 04, 2011, 08:51:44 AM

Quote from: The Script on July 02, 2011, 08:37:18 AM

Quote from: tomcollins on July 02, 2011, 02:39:10 AM

I'd love for someone to tell my why speculation is bad.

I sense a thread derail coming, but yeah I don't see why speculation is so bad.

Apparently that's because both of you aren't aware of how much of it is going on, at least I hope that is the answer. Before I write a 10 page history on this I'll test the waters: do you think that there is any amount of speculation that would be 'too much' or is it fine to have 50 times GDP of a country flowing in and out of that countries capital markets annually?

No, I don't think there is the concept of "too much". Maybe you can explain why. Even just a short summary.

I don't know if the Tobin tax is a good idea but the problem it addresses is huge.

When you try to buy or sell securities, hypertrading is a way that allows the big players to find the maximum price you are willing to pay. They do it by placing and cancelling sales 1000s of times per second when a new buy order appears. The effect is that us peons always pay close to the max we are willing to pay while the Goldman Sachs type institutions pocket the difference between that max and the price the security could be acquired at.

Its thought that transaction tax to eliminate those trades would be helpful. If it provided a buffer for the "too big to fail" banks, so much the better.

Personally I'd worry that the exchange would simply take place somewhere else. I don't know if the tax would work.

So the problem is someone else makes money? Oh noes, how horrible. I pay what I am willing to pay, how horrible.

Problem is that someone else is making money off of you without you getting anything out of it. You literally gain nothing in the transaction while they gain everything.

The funny thing is you're already paying these inflated prices to private hedge funds and other HFT operations. You get to pay more for hyper-traded funds while getting nothing (except for the privilege of paying a little more, I guess). All the details of the existing system look like a tax (since you can't elect not to pay it) except you get nothing out of it. Like I said before in an exchange where 1 party seeks to gain all the utility of the transaction without providing any benefit/utility to the other party seems like a parasitical operation that should be discouraged.

I lose .00005%. Oh no, how horrible. I'll much rather pay a 1% tax instead to keep these bastards from taking my .000005%.

Sounds to me that someone is getting utility, otherwise they wouldn't be engaging in trade.

Did you read any articles related to hyper trading? Comments like this clearly illustrate that you didn't. Please do so. You'll benefit from the process.

The problem is that they are doing these 0.00005% profit trades every micro-second and using those trades and false bids, etc to manipulate the price. Point being is that while their profit from each trade might be this low the total market manipulation is much greater. Please research this more. It's not some benign force mildly inconveniencing you it is a much greater problem than that.