The impact of firms and people going bankrupt that other people making investment and lending decisions will see risk more clearly and may (for a time) be less greedy and stupid when they make capital allocation decisions.
Debts can & do magically disappear. To be clear someone paid for the lost money, but at that stage it's far too late for them to be able to do anything about it, let alone raise prices.
Here's an example: Founder A founds a startup with equity funding from B & C. Later they take loans from D & E. They spend all the money but never become profitable. None of the original investors or lenders is interested in pumping in good money after bad. They voluntarily declare bankruptcy or they default on a loan and D or E forces them into bankruptcy. Either way, whatever is left of the company's assets are sold to reimburse, in part, the loan D & E made. A, B & C got nothing.
A, B, C, D, and E, all lost real money.
But by the time this loss is crystalized, there is no way any of them can go back in time to raise prices to pay for it. It's gone and so is the company. The only thing they can do is act differently in the future.
So no it doesn’t magically disappear. A bankruptcy somewhere is a loss for others somewhere else. Even cutting dept to pennies on the dollar means lenders are losing money. Bankruptcy is not a magic trick…
We could compare it to the railroad boom, and the telecom boom - in both cases vast sums capital expenditures were made, and reasonable people might have concluded that eventually these expenses would have to be reimbursed through higher prices. However, in both cases, many firms simply went bankrupt and all that excess infrastructure went time to serve humanity for decades at lower cost.
60% of all US equity volume is pure high-frequency trading, and ETFs add roughly another 20% that’s literally just bots responding to market activity and bearish-bullish sentiment analysis on public(?) press releases. 2/3 of trading funds also rely on external data to price in decisions, and I think it was around 90% in 2021 use trading algorithms as their determining factor for their high-frequency trade strategies.
At its core, the movements that make up the market really IS data retrieval.
At the end of the day talking about HFT this way is to not know what they do and what service they offer to the market. Overall they are not trending makers but trend followers.
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> (unverified by a human, use at your own risk).
Honorable for mentioning the lack of verification; doing so would have dissolved the AI's statement, but jury's out on how much EXACTLY:
Per https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03784...:
"While estimates vary due to the difficulty in ascertaining whether each trade is an HFT, recent estimates suggest HFT accounts for 50–70% of equity trades and around 50% of the futures market in the U.S., 40% in Canada, and 35% in London (Zhang, 2010, Grant, 2011, O’Reilly, 2012, Easley et al., 2012, Scholtus et al., 2014)"
In my original reply, I used the literal median of that spectrum @ 60%
Jane Street - who has recently found themselves in hot water from the India ban - disputes that AI summary ALONE. Per https://www.globaltrading.net/jane-street-took-10-of-of-us-e... , Jane Street booked 20.5B in trading revenue, primarily though HFT's, just in 2024.
Brought to you by someone who takes these market movements too seriously for their own good.
On the same topic it reminds me Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (from 2005!) where an AI called "Masse Kernels" was automatically creating missions sent to different PMCs, managing war assets, supervising the war effort, coms, and the like... Feels also that's coming, at least in some forms for now.
How much trouble are we in? Can we convert these Lottie things into animated GIFs or something? I have the feeling that this idea of embedding Javascript to animate small, simple icons cannot be good and is going to screw up all the hard work we do on performance and good CWV. I can't believe I'm Googling around for free websites that make animated GIFs right now. It feels like 2003 again. I don't even know who owns or wrote this whole Lottie ecosystem and what all these sub-brands like "Lottie Files" are but I'm expected to embed their code.