My fear as a pessimistic engineer is that unless there is more regulation of HFT, sooner or later someone big (a bank, an exchange, a country) is going to be financially wiped out by a HFT-gone-bad incident, and the resulting mess will take years to unravel while everyone else (pension funds, private investments, etc.) gets to suffer for the sins of their masters.
I propose an exponentially decaying tax on trades - the longer you hold a purchase, the less you pay when you sell it. If you WANT to trade at sub-microsecond levels, you can bloody well pay for the clean-up fund when your system goes bad.
> I propose an exponentially decaying tax on trades - the longer you hold a purchase, the less you pay when you sell it. If you WANT to trade at sub-microsecond levels, you can bloody well pay for the clean-up fund when your system goes bad.
It seems like any tax on trades at all (even a fixed tiny percentage per trade) would go a long way toward reducing HFT.
I propose an exponentially decaying tax on trades - the longer you hold a purchase, the less you pay when you sell it. If you WANT to trade at sub-microsecond levels, you can bloody well pay for the clean-up fund when your system goes bad.