I haven't read the book, but I've followed the chatter and have been listening to Lewis on Bloomberg. I get the impression that many justify HFT by comparing current or past alternatives, however his argument is that HFT is corrupting an otherwise fairer market place. In other words the market should improve and lessen these side businesses that victimize participants and add to the discredit of the exchanges.
If anyone thinks that these side business do not victimize participants you should look back to examples like Knight Capitals glitch that most certainly caused retail investors to lose trust and pull their money from the market, taking a loss. The introduction of non-relevant code is an unnecessary risk that does corrupt the system and does victimize your average investor.
It's sad that I as a retail investor need to spend my valuable time focusing on how not to get screwed by the exchanges that have introduced a side business which does not serve the functioning of the market and instead corrupts it.
You don't actually need to focus on this. As a retail investor your going to get filled at NBBO (National Best Bid and Offer). The people writing things that make you think otherwise are selling irrational fear.
It's no different than how local news makes people think that crime in the US is at an all time high by reporting on it all the time when, in fact, crime has been dropping for decades.
This may appear spammy, but I found Kepner Trego training[1] to really help prevent this kind of stuff from happening. The strategy is more effective when everybody in the room has had the training, which limits its usefulness with external clients, but I'll still recommend it anyway.
> However, this is illustrating a particular problem that only affects engineers -- engineers are the ones at the end of the day who have to make a solution reality.
This is simply not true. In the past I was a Business Analyst. I would meet with clients to gather requirements and that illustration would often unfold in the same manner.
It has nothing to do with a persons role, it has everything to do with having large knowledge or expertise gaps.
Having been a developer, contract developer, consulting analyst, and consulting architect, I can say you are right. There are challenges for business analysts, similar to this.
But it's not the same league. Technology often comes down to "it can be done" or "it can't be done without a lot more effort than you are willing to pay for".
Sure, a business analyst may have similar problems ("this process works" vs. "this process would take 5 people a week, each time - but we only have 1 person for 4 days"). However you, the business analyst, are not usually then expected to go away and actually make X happen - you hand over your requirements to other people for them to "make it happen".
So you think BA's can not learn, even through experience, what can or can not be done?
Sure, there's always somebody else, same role or not, who has more expertise, but don't confuse role/title for expertise. I've seen BA's with a decade of experience school junior engineers on what can or can not be done.
It's that when it comes down to actually making it work, it's the engineer that has to provide a working solution to the specification. Not a figurative engineer with years of experience and knowledge. The actual person that has the task. Pretty much everyone else in the chain has to make assumptions about what is possible, in what time frame, with what resources. Yes, the more experience you have, the better you get at doing that.
But trust me when I say that all too often, even product engineers for million dollar figure products, have little idea if X is possibly in time Y until they actually try and do it. (I've worked at multiple companies with multi-million product licenses, and seen it at all of them). Sure, a few of the delivery engineers had a much better idea. But there was no way any of the analysts, project managers, and especially not the sales engineers, had any clue about the time. You'd get answers from 1/10th Y through to 10 x Y - 10000% variance.
I'll suggest there's a missing ingredient here...I found I was able to eliminate many of my comments by asking myself if that someone whom might read my code would be better served with a unit test instead. I also found, however, that this needs to lead to an understanding that unit test are in fact a form of documentation and should be treated as such.
I'm pretty sure, in that video, the argument was that while glucose is still really bad for you, fructose[1] is much, much worse - it's a poison that's causing an epidemic.
1. And specifically the manufactured fructose isolates vs. natural fructose found in fruit.
Edit: rather glucose in high quantities as noted in response below.
I don't think so. The video says that there is nothing wrong with glucose, it is the fuel of life. Fructose is the problem. More specifically, refined fructose.
This by the way reflects real life. You can find populations that live on mostly bread and pasta, or mostly rice and noodles and they do not have obesity problems. It is only when refined sugar enters the diet that obesity shows up.
> And specifically the manufactured fructose isolates vs. natural fructose found in fruit.
Is there an explanation as to why this would be the case (if it is)? With a lot of vitamins the argument is over absorbability of different forms, e.g. there are various forms of dietary calcium, and various kinds of calcium supplements, and they may not be equivalent. But my understanding was that fructose in fruit is pretty much just fructose, readily absorbable just like the isolated version is. The only plausible difference I can come up is concentration; there's a limit on how much fructose you can get from fruits because the average person is not going to scarf down a half-dozen pears in a sitting. But if high concentrations are the issue, it would also apply to concentrated "natural" fructose, e.g. the pear-juice concentrate that some "naturally sweetened" products use.
There is an explanation. I urge you to watch the entire video. The problem with fructose is that the liver has only a limited ability to properly process it. This if you get too much the liver processes a lot of it through the wrong pathways, and that causes all types of chaos.
There are a couple of differences with natural fructose. First natural fructose almost always comes with fiber. The fiber if processed at the same time as the fructose allows the liver to properly process more fructose. This is because the fiber provides certain nutrients which allow the liver to process more fructose along the proper pathways.
Second, natural fructose is usually in plant cells. In order for us to process these, we much first break down the plant cells in our stomach. This takes some time, so the effect is that the natural fructose does not hit the liver in the same speed and concentration as refined fructose.
This all has scientific support by the way. Lustig mentioned a study in old Caribbean sugar plantations. There they tracked the health of the masters and workers. It turned out that while both the masters and workers ate mostly sugar, the masters had a lot of health problems associated with obesity and diabetes, while the workers did not. The difference was that the masters ate refined sugar, while the workers mostly just ate raw sugar cane.
There was another study in japan, where scientists tried to give people massive amounts of sugar in the form of apples. These people did not have any of the problems associated with high sugar intake.
Fructose is fructose, there's no "natural fructose" however it's one thing to eat it pure, another one in a fruit
That I can buy. What I'm more skeptical of is that there's a distinction between "manufactured" and "natural" fructose once both have been concentrated and are used as additives to sweeten other products. Eating a pear is one thing, but I'm less sure that a "naturally sweetened" product which has been sweetened with concentrated pear juice or a similar fruit-based sugar extract is really more healthy than the same product that has been sweetened with more conventional "manufactured" sugars. I don't doubt that eating an actual fruit is almost certainly better than either one.
There's only one type of glycogen that's stored in different places. The article you linked only refers to "rapid glycogen restoration". Don't assume from that that the liver can't produce glycogen from fructose.
There is absolutely no explanation. It's just neo-puritanical mystical thinking. The only problem with eating refined sugars is the paucity of vitamins and minerals. Fruit juice is loaded with both of these, yet the lustigites still try to claim fruit sugars without the fiber are bad for you, with no sound basis.
yeah, i should have said in high quantities, but I was just paraphrasing the video. The point was, in the video, he did not say it was just fructose, glucose can also be a problem.
It can be a problem if you're type I diabetic or are obese, both of which result in impaired insulin sensitivity.
Otherwise, you can quite healthily gorge on starch and sugars and your tissues will happily mop up the glucose and fructose into glycogen. And then if necessary into fat, but lipogensis from sugars is surprisingly inefficient and glycogen capacity is more than you probably think.
Ever seen those web adverts that list a few generic health problems and ask you to 'click here', or read a horoscope that makes claims almost anyone can relate to?
So how is this different? Why so many upvotes...really, this is just more spam - is it not?
I think it's either (a) a voting ring, or (b) the changing demographic here. Ignoring (a) (because we can't prove/disprove as we aren't admins/mods), we can discuss (b).
5-7 years ago, this place was "mostly founders and early employees". This would've likely been flagged or, at best, only received a few upvotes. Today, I suspect its 10% "founders and early employees" and 90% "other". This is likely interesting to the "other" demographic - first they've seen it, or it may resonate with them because it's very negative focused and they see themselves in it.
If anyone thinks that these side business do not victimize participants you should look back to examples like Knight Capitals glitch that most certainly caused retail investors to lose trust and pull their money from the market, taking a loss. The introduction of non-relevant code is an unnecessary risk that does corrupt the system and does victimize your average investor.
1. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...