Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Take over

The Times predicted that 90% of traders will be axe-d by 2015 due to advances in technology in an article.

"The future of trading, it seems, is in the hands of technology. And instead of human traders earning the big bucks, it will be IT developers and programmers and software companies who will be earning the big money, enabling investment banks and other financial institutions to trade all manner of products electronically."

Fat hope man:
  1. like the response say, all the machines will end up pricing things the same way, killing the volatility, making it not worthwhile to trade anymore, well regress to a straight line, better off buying index funds
  2. machines bound to react based on templates, in unusual situations, it will crash
  3. machines have no human 'sense', they can't predict what is happening at the other side of the table given that it is a human trading
  4. you are possibly gaining because the other side is making mistakes, if machines cannot make mistakes, where is the gain?
  5. all said and done, those people who develop algorithmic trading are traders aren't they? traders won't let this machine takeover happen. period.

No comments: