Re: <nettime> The secret financial market only robots can see

["Chad Scoville" <chad@chadscoville.com>]

As someone intimately involved in this area for some time, and also privy enough to the dialogue in the academic non-practitioner space, in addition to the professional space, I am always amused to the extent with which electronic/hft/algo trading is misinterpreted and in many instances blatantly misunderstood. I know for many participants in this list, this subject is very controversial and hits very close to home - hence out of respect for a civilized discouse on the subject, I think generally before someone quotes 'NANEX' again, we would all do well to remember that overall having a debate about the ethics surrounding degrees of speculation in markets is highy ludic. The same technical parallax we use to communicate via nettime is also the mechanism utilized for deployment of sophistcated trading models.

Machines being leveraged to generate resources is a legacy of our civilization - and arguing about the ethics of this specific incarnation of capital is reactionary and we need to do better. The conversation should be less emotional about the implications of this systemically, and instead how much novelty gets generated in culture as a afterimage of electonic market making. Robots trading was a forgone conclusion when NYSE SuperDOT came on the scene. Earlier, Reuter revolutions infomation arbitrage with the uilization of passerger pigeons to exploit data leakage between markets.

I'm pleased to see that Brian Holmes stepped in to comment, as I respect his views on things nettime. However, I think we need to sharper with our critical analysis of this aesthetic and not dismiss this simply because the old media latches onto it as a point of controversy.

/////chadscoville
/////www.riftrouter.cx


-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Holmes [mailto:bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2013 12:20 PM
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> The secret financial market only robots can see

 <...>


#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org