Comment by andsoitis

6 months ago

Come on. The stock market is not just data retrieval. The statement doesn’t even make sense.

It makes perfect sense, and I meant what I said.

60% of all US equity volume is pure high-frequency trading, and ETFs add roughly another 20% that’s literally just bots responding to market activity and bearish-bullish sentiment analysis on public(?) press releases. 2/3 of trading funds also rely on external data to price in decisions, and I think it was around 90% in 2021 use trading algorithms as their determining factor for their high-frequency trade strategies.

At its core, the movements that make up the market really IS data retrieval.

  • Sure, the market, but HFT is relatively tiny as a market and the profit it brings. Not to mention, it's essentially a zero-sum game.

    Brought to you by your favorite Google LLM search result:

    "The global high-frequency trading (HFT) market was valued at USD 10.36 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 16.03 billion by 2030"

    (unverified by a human, use at your own risk).

    • >"The global high-frequency trading (HFT) market was valued at USD 10.36 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 16.03 billion by 2030"

      >> (unverified by a human, use at your own risk).

      Honorable for mentioning the lack of verification; doing so would have dissolved the AI's statement, but jury's out on how much EXACTLY:

      Per https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...:

      "While estimates vary due to the difficulty in ascertaining whether each trade is an HFT, recent estimates suggest HFT accounts for 50–70% of equity trades and around 50% of the futures market in the U.S., 40% in Canada, and 35% in London (Zhang, 2010, Grant, 2011, O’Reilly, 2012, Easley et al., 2012, Scholtus et al., 2014)"

      In my original reply, I used the literal median of that spectrum @ 60%

      Jane Street - who has recently found themselves in hot water from the India ban - disputes that AI summary ALONE. Per https://www.globaltrading.net/jane-street-took-10-of-of-us-e... , Jane Street booked 20.5B in trading revenue, primarily though HFT's, just in 2024.

      Brought to you by someone who takes these market movements too seriously for their own good.

      2 replies →

  • The percentage is irrelevant without knowing how they really work and how much profit they make. They could be at 95% with 0.1% of margin it wouldn’t mean much for the market.

    At the end of the day talking about HFT this way is to not know what they do and what service they offer to the market. Overall they are not trending makers but trend followers.

    • What? THAT CASH comes from owning the inside spread on roughly half of every US equity share that trades. They quote a micro-price adjustment, and it pushes out anyone slower - which exactly the “service” that lets retail investors, like us, hit a bid or ask.

      Honestly, whether YOU want to call that trend-following or market-making - I can't be arsed, but it’s still data-retrieval that runs THE institutional scale

      4 replies →