It also has anti-inflammatory properties, particularly against IL-6 expression. IL-6 is notoriously elevated during the second week or so of COVID-19 symptoms.
He cited the infamous squirrel monkey study without noting that (a) there were no signs of neural death or neurite retraction anywhere, and (b) reduced baseline dopamine levels are exactly what you would expect as part of the mechanism of tolerance.
That study did not establish the existence of neurotoxicity. It merely established the existence of tolerance.
Anonymity also permitted the American Revolution, among other things.
Meanwhile the most prominent example that comes to mind for attempts to end even the pretense of anonymity online is authoritarian China.
And fwiw, most of the other boards on 4chan at least tend to push the more obnoxious sorts of commentary back to /pol/, its 'containment board'.
Twitter likewise tends to isolate communities of extremists, on both sides, simply by virtue of explicit blocking or mere lack of sufficient interest to follow on the part of more balanced participants.
> "I assume that most ATS's are located within a short distance of each other."
... if only. Reg NMS is a massive headache. This sort of price convergence would be better left to the arbitrageurs. Let the market deal with the light speed issues instead of trying to regulate physics.
The entire point is that there are intermediate holding periods. Think about intraday speculators and statistical arbitrage funds who trade on scales of minutes to hours. They bridge the gap. Further out you have fundamental hedge funds, individual traders, pension funds, etc.
>"A bid I can never hit because it will be gone any time I'd actually want to hit it..."
Why should they let you hit them when they expect to lose? The HFT firms have some pretty decent traders. They're not going to sit there idle and let you pick them off. If you want to win this game, you have to be better than the competition.
Actively traded funds are not "evil." Actively traded funds are the only reason you can buy an index fund and actually expect a decent return. Without active traders, the market would be inefficient, i.e. things would not be fairly priced.
The Flash Crash was caused by the NYSE's faulty time-stamping system. It essentially broadcast false information that caused traders to think there was an arbitrage opportunity. This was entirely the NYSE's fault. See here for details: http://www.nanex.net/20100506/FlashCrashAnalysis_Part3-1.htm...
> And massive profits for companies that create nothing
They prevent you from paying even more to corrupt exchange specialists. This creates billions of dollars a year in value. They also have a neat ability to help the market recover from irrational crashes in 20 minutes, instead of lingering there for days or months while everyone is too scared to provide liquidity.
> and actually were the cause of the recent financial meltdown.
HFT is completely unrelated to the financial meltdown. The financial meltdown was caused by a housing bubble. HFT market makers don't even trade mortgage-backed securities. Those were traded over-the-counter (basically via phone calls) by investment banks.
If you don't know what these words mean, then look them up instead of complaining about it. If you want to make a point, it is your obligation to understand the subject matter. Don't argue about things you don't understand.
The cash comes from traders/investors who are impatient. If you want to trade immediately instead of waiting and hoping for someone else to hit your order, you have to pay the spread. Market-makers make money by allowing impatient traders to transact with them, and then holding the inventory until other impatient traders want to buy/sell it.
This requires the market-maker to take a risk. The spread compensates them for the risk. The size of the spread is (currently, with HFT) set by competition between market-makers. Before HFT, there was much less competition between market-makers, and spreads were hence much wider. Back then, this resulted in the transfer of significant wealth from investors to exchange specialists. In modern markets with HFT market-makers instead of specialists, these transaction costs are much lower, which saves you and your pension fund money.
Example:
Suppose the national best bid on stock ABCDE is $15.17 and the best offer is $15.18. The "spread" is $0.01. (These limit orders were almost certainly placed by market-makers using HFT.)
If you want to buy ABCDE, you can do one of two things:
- You can place a limit order to buy at 15.17 and wait and hope that someone sells some to you.
- Alternately, you can place a market order that will cross the spread and buy at 15.18 instantly.
The market order protects you from the roughly 50-50 chance that ABCDE prices start increasing and your order never gets filled. It costs $0.01 per share, which is basically paying the HFT market-maker for liquidity (the ability to trade immediately).
Before HFT, the spread might have been $0.05 or even $0.10. You would still have the same two choices, but instead of $0.01, you would have to pay some human specialist $0.05-0.10+ if you wanted immediacy. His father and grandfather would have also been specialists, and his bonus would have been several million dollars that year. HFT market-makers simply out-competed these parasites. There is no longer a monopoly on market-making, so liquidity has gotten cheaper.
Correspondingly, it is cheaper for you to trade (ditto for mutual funds, pension funds, hedge funds, etc.). This allows you to keep more of your investment profits.
HFT didn't cause the flash crash, but neither did that mutual fund manager.
The primary cause was a delay in when incoming orders were time-stamped by the NYSE. Instead of stamping the orders when they arrived at the queue just before entering the market, the NYSE servers time-stamped them when they _left_ the queue and were placed in the book.
Since the queue was delayed by extreme volume (NYSE has always lagged on technology), stale prices were posted to the NYSE feed. However, it was impossible to tell that they were stale from the timestamps.
Since the market was falling rapidly, this resulted in the NYSE quoting higher prices than every other market.
Since the NYSE was quoting higher prices than every other market, arbitrageurs massively sold at the NYSE and bought on other exchanges.
Since the queue was delayed, however, the sell orders at the NYSE took a while to actually show up in the book. Meanwhile, more sell orders were placed.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22766077