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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 11 May 2010

As if life in the USA wasn’t surreal enough last week. Once upon a time, the stock market was a place where people with capital went to look for productive activity to invest in — say, a company devoted to making soap flakes, an underpants factory. Now the market is a robot combat arena where algorithms battle for supremacy of the feedback loops. Thursday’s still-baffling fifteen-minute “crash” was an excellent demonstration of the diminishing returns of technology. People too-clever-by-half, aided greatly by computers, have now gamed the investment indexes so successfully that these markets no longer have anything to do with investment — they’re just about shaving micro-points of profit at high volumes by micro-milliseconds off mere differentials in… math! This is truly quant heaven, a place where only numbers matter and there is no correspondence to anything in the real world. In other words, last Thursday’s bizarre action was a warning that the American stock markets have flown up their own aggregate ass. James Howard Kunstler

60 notes

  1. woody reblogged this from erickd and added:
    azspot:erickd) Really, really great quote - I cannot believe that more people don’t realize how important that it is...
  2. acidwashgenes reblogged this from dalasverdugo
  3. adailyriot reblogged this from think4yourself
  4. think4yourself reblogged this from azspot
  5. n0her0es reblogged this from dalasverdugo and added:
    Kunstler:azspot:dalasverdugo Once again,
  6. erikawithac reblogged this from minou
  7. kamweshde reblogged this from ifinkyufreeky
  8. dalasverdugo reblogged this from azspot
  9. erickd reblogged this from azspot
  10. abcsoupdot reblogged this from azspot
  11. minou reblogged this from kelsium
  12. tumblklaat said: nah…last week was no glitch…it was caused simply ppl who were shorting gold panicking and quickly selling stock to cover their short position. HFT is definitely a scam though.
  13. kelsium reblogged this from shorterexcerpts and added:
    Ladies and gentlemen, this is financialization. The end of an empire: ur hastening it.
  14. nothingshortof reblogged this from azspot
  15. shorterexcerpts reblogged this from azspot
  16. thenewephemera reblogged this from azspot

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