A friend was trying to convince me that high frequency trading was a good thing because of the liquidity it added to the market would allow me to sell my stock in milliseconds. If I've been holding a stock for twenty years, when I go to sell it, do I really care if it takes twenty minutes instead of twenty milliseconds? From the look on his face it was obvious that in his world investing in stocks long term is completely alien. Can't be too hard on him though, he did warn me of the Great Recession months in advance, with problems he was seeing in credit default swap pricing being what he considered the Archduke Ferdinand of the financial system.
> If I've been holding a stock for twenty years, when I go to sell it, do I really care if it takes twenty minutes instead of twenty milliseconds?
I think you may care actually. To give an example, I was holding a stock for several years that recently went up in price quickly, without much change in the underlying business. Simply, analysts started changing their rating on it. When this stock got high enough, I started to feel nervous, and I was watching the market open on a day when I was prepared to sell. Immediately, the stock started to tank, and I sold it right away.
I sold it at a good price, and even though I was a long term investor, I made a short term decision to sell based off the (IMO) extremely irrational price.
"do I really care if it takes twenty minutes instead of twenty milliseconds?"
No, nobody sensible cares. But the stuff people are suspicious of is supposed to be regulated so that your executions are only improved. If somehow this isn't true, it should be a bright line crossed and a big scandal with people going to jail or at least big fines.
Then again, if you panic over a "flash crash", then I guess you should be concerned about liquidity?
> You got to be kidding me. You rely on FB "exclusively" for news? That's like trusting a Nigerian scammer with your money!
Context is important. In this case, he actually has some pretty defensible reasons for using Facebook this way: active suppression of local independent journalists and low activity by independent Western journalists. My guess is his alternative to Facebook is probably some pro-Assad propaganda rag. As bad as Facebook is, that's worse.
Your reaction would be more appropriate for someone chose to rely on FB for news about the US or Western Europe.
al jazeera is a perfectly good source of real middle east news. The economist isn't bad. Facebook is entirely unreliable as a news source because for every real post that shows you how things really are, you get two lies.
As just one measure, FB themselves deleted over 3 Billion fake accounts between april and sept last year. These are accounts that provided a phone number for verification. The disinformation operations on that site are like nothing anyone has ever seen.
Al Jazeera is the opposite of reputable journalism. Just look into their ties with the government's of the oil producing Arab States as well as their support for the OIC
They're also responsible for things like extremely biased reporting against Myanmar (no reporting about Ang sang su kyis speech at the genocide tribunal except "she didn't say the word rohinga!"). It's no surprise that there's also a strong campaign by the OIC to slander Myanmar which is running concurrently
Boeing is a 100 year old company in the business of building airplanes that transports hundreds of millions of passengers annually. Rushing to introduce this plane was absolutely unacceptable. It took Boeing decades to build its stellar reputation, but after something like this, their reputation is ruined in a matter of days.
Boeing stopped being Boeing when they bought McDonald Douglas and inherited a bunch of Jack Welch trained managers. They took the company from an engineering company to a commodity company where what they were selling didn't matter, it's all just widgets in the end. One of their first actions was to gut the various engineering departments.
The market hasn't gone anywhere in the last year. The first 1-2 years was helped by massive tax cuts implemented by Trump which juiced corporate earnings.
Agreed. Clearly a negotiation tactic. I expect nothing material to come out of the upcoming meeting. I work in public equities and this has been such an ongoing headache... anyone remember when a full deal was supposed to get done by end of March 2019?
And what, making a Uyghur American the National Security Council's China director also a negotiation tactic? Anyone in equities who believes that there will be a deal isn't paying attention.
Phyek stated that it is a negotiation tactic, which implies that decisions are being made in respect to potentially making a deal. The overriding consensus on both sides of the isle are that China must be confronted. There will be no deal.
