Read your link. Dark pools are created so institutions can trade large blocks without moving the price, or to hide transactions.
Dark pools are beneficial to institutions in some circumstances, not to individuals.
And yes HFT hasn't always existed, once upon a time you'd have a pit of screaming traders and brokers, and for an individual to buy/sell stocks you'd have to call your broker on the phone, who'd charge you an obscene amount for the privilege.
Anyhow, HFT is more or less just a euphemism for high-speed arbitrage/market making.
I look at the execution I get on my trades today, I couldn't imagine not having that service available.
Yes and the bit about 'predatory HFT' is backed up with an article which has no information about what constitutes 'predatory HFT', it merely repeats the words in a small annotion. The article is more about the regulatory concerns over dark pools.
I'll tell you why they use dark pools. On the open market, if you sell lots of shares, buyers will see that, and drop their bids. Likewise if you put in a large bid, sellers will raise their asks. In a dark pool, institutions can move large blocks at a given price without market forces interfering, and reduce trading costs.
I'm confused. Dark pools (ie, private exchanges) are devices used primarily by giant investment banks and hedge funds to try to load or unload large amounts of stock without moving the market.
What point are you trying to make about them? That if we didn't have HFT, we wouldn't need them? That's an argument for HFT, not against.
Dark pools exist largely to prevent HFT from parasitically extracting value from large trades. Spearing whales I believe it's called. Giant investment banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and pension funds use them.
>That if we didn't have HFT, we wouldn't need them? That's an argument for HFT, not against.
Dark pools are an evolved defense against parasitic market players that is not cheap. These costs are then passed on to you via your pension fund, index fund or if you buy insurance.
I don't see how that's an argument for them unless you or your friends were personally profiting from it.
You and I buy stocks in small amounts. Intuitively, after each of our trades, we understand that the market moves to take the impact of those trades into account. That's the point of markets!
So why on earth should it be that a hedge fund should be able to buy or sell huge amounts of stock without having the market move? You don't have that power. Why do they? The fact that a giant entity is trying to move huge amounts of stock is information. The point of the market is to capture that information and build it into prices. That's exactly what HFTs are doing in this scenario.
The expectation that hedge fund managers have that they should be able to capture the spot price of a security and then buy or sell arbitrary amounts at that price, taking their information advantage out of the hides of every other market participant, seems totally unfair. Again: you don't have that privilege on the market. Why do they?
You keep saying "shout in a pit" as if that was the primary benefit of electronic trading. But of course, that's not the primary benefit. The major benefit is that with humans out of the loop, it's harder to grift huge amounts of money from people trying to do simple trades.
For instance: Google [odd eighths scandal].
And that's a modern example of humans rigging the markets, exploiting lack of competition and automation. Things get much worse the further back you go in time.
The primary benefit was that it decreased transaction costs which is the reason spreads went down in the late 90s/early 00s when humans were still in the loop.
Humans are of course perfectly capable of rigging the market with or without computers, a fact so mind-blowingly obvious, I'm not sure why you'd accuse someone of believing that it's false.
This particular thread was not about market rigging, it was about whether HFT can really be credited with decreasing spreads in the early 00s.
