Tuesday, August 07, 2012

From markets to math

Watch this graph to watch financial market insanity:
This astonishing GIF comes from Nanex, and shows the amount of high-frequency trading in the stock market from January 2007 to January 2012. (Which means that the Knightmare craziness of last week is not included.)
I bet this school cut back on sex education as well, what do you think? Get Tested Or Get Out: School Forces Pregnancy Tests on Girls, Kicks out Students Who Refuse or are Pregnant

Protecting your identity online and more.

Merika the Beautiful.

Water Wars.

Finding lost pyramids with Google Earth?

Romney's Mormon sense of entitlement includes lying.



The gun.

If you don't have a facebook account you are a terrorist!... or just weird.

A creationist science text book.  And their distrust of set theory.

4 comments:

Steve Bates said...

Re: the animated GIF... I've read that the large trading firms have direct connections from their computers to the exchange computers, possibly even co-located to maximize transfer rates, so they can trade literally a thousand times faster than the fastest human on any kind of manual connection over the internet.

Again, based on what I've read, on their own computers, the trading firms run proprietary software that (apparently, no one knows for sure) performs the equivalent of a trade per millisecond, but apparently they have the privilege of canceling a trade within a similarly short time... having noted the reaction of the market to the tentative trade.

Now I'm talking through my hat, here, because nobody except the financial companies' executives (and of course programmers) really know. But the actual trades appear to flicker through the exchange computers at speeds imperceptible to the eye on a chart like the one you linked to.

They can do it. We can't. Even if we regularly invest, we can't. It's a privilege for the MOTU, the 1%, the elite. Don't expect that we will have it anytime soon.

ellroon said...

Their weird 'computer' formulas that allow them to whiz through trades in milliseconds need to stop. Banksters cannot regulate themselves, and they lose control when they see large piles of money. So pull the damned plug and make them go back to trading by telegraph. Or by horse.

Steve Bates said...

And who will pull the plug? Banksters cannot control themselves; therefore, they are controlled by (among other entities) the Fed, and who are the Fed but banksters, and who appoints the various Fed boards but banksters (supposedly to keep them independent of political control), etc. ad nauseam. Read Dean Baker's excellent short online book, The End of Loser Liberalism for a good summary of why and how we keep getting hammered by the anti-regulation banksters. It's going to be a tough road, and probably a long one.

(Google is LENGTHENING the "dark" part of the CAPTCHA text, damn them!)

ellroon said...

Arggh. Ok, we need banksters to realize they are killing the golden goose by strangling the middle class and the poor... no.

Um.. I have it!! We need to clone Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and vote them into office in every branch of government! Only then will we get some people with intelligence into government....

*sigh*...