Honestly, that's not even a peanut compared to what more typical finance institutions manage and earn.
Your typical institutional investor (pension funds, insurance company, fund of fund, bank, etc) manages in the 100s to 1000 billions. Each.
The whole HFT industry probably makes what a single institutional investor earns by buying US debt at 1%.
The HFT industry really is just a small microcosm, it just so happens that it triggers dreams and fantaisies in the public mind.
> If low latency trading was banned real humans could compete for that money.
But that's what we had before, and was it better ? I don't think having 1000s of trader monkeys buying and selling while refreshing their price feeds or shouting in a pit is any better.
At the end of the day, as long as there will be market inefficiencies, there will be arbitragers. I don't see the point of kicking those arbitraging at 1us to replace them with people arbitraging at 1s or 1m.
For a while at least HFC was able to pay a lot of money to some really smart people to do some really weird high performance computing projects. Sure to the industry the amount of money they has wasn't even a peanut, but to a normal person on the street it was still a lot of money, and even to the financial industry it was still worth (for a while) paying high salaries to the very best for that fraction of a peanut.
Honestly, that's not even a peanut compared to what more typical finance institutions manage and earn.
Your typical institutional investor (pension funds, insurance company, fund of fund, bank, etc) manages in the 100s to 1000 billions. Each.
The whole HFT industry probably makes what a single institutional investor earns by buying US debt at 1%.
The HFT industry really is just a small microcosm, it just so happens that it triggers dreams and fantaisies in the public mind.
> If low latency trading was banned real humans could compete for that money.
But that's what we had before, and was it better ? I don't think having 1000s of trader monkeys buying and selling while refreshing their price feeds or shouting in a pit is any better.
At the end of the day, as long as there will be market inefficiencies, there will be arbitragers. I don't see the point of kicking those arbitraging at 1us to replace them with people arbitraging at 1s or 1m.