Friday, April 4, 2014

Berkshire's Munger: High-Frequency Trading 'Basically Evil'

The video clip below is about a year old thus before current press created by Michael Lewis' Flash Boys, but it is interesting to watch now after getting into Lewis' book, as it has become more clear what Munger meant by his comments now that I have a better understanding of how HFT works.
"I think the long term investor is not too much affected by things like the flash crash. That said, I think it is very stupid to allow a system to evolve where half of the trading is a bunch of short term people trying to get information one millionth of a nanosecond ahead of somebody else," Munger said. 
"It's legalized front-running. I think it is basically evil and I don't think it should have ever been allowed to reach the size that it did," he said. "Why should all of us pay a little group of people to engage in legalized front-running of our orders?"


Link