Death comes to us all. Life's but a walking shadow | I haven't carefully examined his evidence but his hypothesis that "algorithm trade" aka "Watson" has taken over the futures market is interesting and ominous. We assume that one of the legitimate purposes of the market is to discover the proper price not just make somebody a lot of money. An algorithm is a human invention who's details are secret. It doesn't neccessarily still include Adam Smith's assumptions. One assumption in particular was the presence of a large number of independent market participants working to maximize their individual gain, namely the "invisible hand". Algorithms are invisible alright.
The other thing about human inventions is that they can contain serious flaws. |