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RE: Why Financial Crises Will Continue To Occur As Long As Humans Run The Markets

in #money8 years ago (edited)

Unless true artifitial intelligence enters the markets - conscious machines capable of indepentent thinking and reasoning, without any human emotion, then i think humans can still have the advantage. As far as i know, market bots are still programmed by humans, controlled by humans, turned on and off by humans, ect. As long as that is the case, then human emotion comes into play.

Machines can definitely provide short term advantages in HFT, but longer term trading - days, weeks, months - Im not sure they are advantageous. Intraday moves, and even daily moves in some cases, are much more convoluted than they used to be. Sometimes its as if they can smell a human trader. Longer term market moves are generally more organic.

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Machines can only improve things like price equalisation through arbitrage between markets where prices are out of sync with each other. Because the market is so well connected these days, these price differentials tend to be very small and short lived. Machine-based trading systems may be able to eliminate some of the advantage of a skilled trader, especially when the transactions are not possible for a human to interact with. But markets are for humans, and thus they cannot be replaced by machines. They can help make markets more efficient, but they cannot replace humans. Without a person wanting something, there is no market in meeting those wants.

There is a lot of people with mistaken ideas about economics, usually based on Marx's well and truly disproven labor theory of value, the econometrics of Keynes and similar people whose real reason for these ideas, not a lot different from Marx, was to try and eliminate subjectivity from marketplaces. This is impossible, for the reasons I just explained above. The entire edifice of 'technocracy' falls down because of its lack of accounting for the natural, subjective nature of markets. They are trying to solve problems that were caused in the first place by big interventions in the shape of legislation and interest rate manipulation. If people understood economics, they would realise the people promoting these interventions are in fact robbing people, by clever methods, and the solutions are turning the problems created into political footballs to justify giving more power to politicians and bankers.

But they made the problems in the first place. Humans may not be perfect and markets cannot be perfectly efficient at allocating resources, but letting scamming scumbags peddling snake oil and worshiping like they are the saviors of people in trouble because of scamming scumbag snake oil peddlers... this is the problem in the first place.