Complex systems can be stable but close to collapse. Individually within we see stability and presume everything is fine while laughing at preppers. After a crash we can see all the signs that were there, and we retcon stories about crashes.
Complex systems seem to crash suddenly once a point of criticality is teetered over, where causes and effects that feed on each other driving the crash harder (positive feedback is not positive).
We retroactively create stories about dependencies (Archduke Franz Ferdinand).
Watching systems come back up after a shock is also weird (earthquake in my hometown Christchurch was a spectacular example of recovery).
Trying to diagnose how modern financial crises occurred is eye-opening.
Only a handful of people can earn a living becoming academics and we're in a time where many people are being "pushed" into credentialing up. Forcing people who are going back to school to further their professional careers to learn a language that isn't marketable makes the degree they're trying earn worth less.
Please think harder about why you're offering this class and consider offering something else instead that will provide more value to the adults trying to compete in this flat world.
I've profitably used the domain modeling and program design lessons I've learned from Prolog multiple times, please and thank you. You don't need to use a language in production for it to be a valuable addition to your toolkit.
We live in the age of COVID. All of society had to change it's daily patterns in a matter of days. Considering this, doing another societal wide tweak to rid ourselves from biannually screwing with our sleep patterns does seem trivial.
All that changing the time on the clock does is change our schedule.
If you'd like to both switch to year-round DST and also move everyone's professional start times an hour later, I'm definitely on board... but you should realize that you've effectively moved us to permanent standard time!
What others have said about leverage, standard deviation of prices, A+B book biz models, get rich scheme marketing, finding some sort of predictability is paramount, a tendency to find really bottom of the barrel people running the retail brokerages are all true.
The retail FX market is a dark, dark place. I spent roughly half a decade in the space setting up marketing analytic systems and presences for existing and new entrants into the space throughout the world. If you have a shred of humanity in you, I recommend staying the heck away from it minus having a small sum in it if you like testing your understanding of macro economics. Outcomes are very binary and most brokerages have code running to prevent their clients from developing a strategic advantage for that reason.
With all that said, amazed anyone put in any effort to make the Metatrader product look pretty. There's 0 money in it. The existing market does NOT like change. Means trying to find a new way to screw everyone else.
Not OP, but a broker wouldn't even need a front-running bot. If they're the intermediary (A book) then they can just apply markups to the quotes from their maker. If they're the maker (B book), they're the ones quoting the prices. Front-running is moot in either case.
I've heard lots of rumors and wild conspiracy theories about things like this but a lot of it is impractical if not impossible using industry standard platforms and software. I can't even imagine a broker manipulating the quote feed for thousands or tens of thousands of other traders just to hit one guy's stop but that doesn't stop people from being paranoid. Many traders worry about this so much that they won't use stops.
Things that are commonly done which could be described that way include delaying orders, changing spreads, and reducing account leverage. There are legitimate purposes for doing these things but the potential for abuse is certainly there. A quick Google for "virtual dealer plugin" will tell you more if you're interested.
I've also heard that some brokers will supposedly induce "artificial" slippage but to me that seems like a lot of effort and risk for very little reward unless it's done on a massive scale.
I'm familiar with the industry and I can corroborate most of this. I'm fairly certain I know where you worked based on that product description and if I'm correct then we've more than likely met once or twice.
Retail FX is a surprisingly small community and I often wonder how many people really know how the sausage is made. Aside from a handful of properly bankrolled professional traders and the odd compulsive gambler, people who have had a peek behind the curtain tend to stay away from trading. This isn't necessarily because brokers are shady— even the most honest broker will have no problem making money off its clients. People need to understand that FX trading is a set of skills which takes a lot of time, money, and effort to acquire and keep current. Even with the requisite skills, consistently grinding out the same hourly income you'd get working the Arby's drive thru requires a five figure bankroll to maintain sustainable levels of risk in the long-term. Trading is a real job which requires lots of real work.
The shady part is allowing traders to be lured in by MLM-esque instagram influencers in rented Ferraris and approving high leverage accounts for people who have $50 and no clue what they're doing and no chance of success. The smaller fish also tend to pay larger spreads and commissions, stacking the deck against them even further. Watching these guys trade is like seeing someone in a 2004 Hyundai Sonata pull into the Nürburgring during an F1 race.
Volatility and leverage get a bad rap. Yes, they give you plenty of rope to hang yourself with, but they're also some of the most powerful weapons at your disposal if you're quantifying and managing your risk properly. The majority of retail traders take on insane levels of risk at some point or another because it sucks spending hours on your setups for a $5 profit. It only takes a single moment of weakness to take on enough excess risk to blow an account in one go, and that's why B book models are so ubiquitous and profitable. Sure, there are countless ways an unscrupulous broker could abuse their position as the counterparty to your trades and the distrust they get is rational and mostly well-deserved, but having a thumb on the scale isn't even necessary when there's a seemingly endless supply of idiots who think they can take $1,000 and martingale it into millions.
That said, I think people worry disproportionately about B books. In general, "A book" (aka "straight through processing") just means your position is routed (hedged) elsewhere with some other counterparty. There's nothing inherently bad about this, but be aware that these makers have the same incentive to separate you from your money and they tend to be much more sophisticated and less transparent than retail brokers in doing so. A prominent and easily understood example of this is last look execution. In most cases I'd rather be on an honest broker's B book than tossed in with the sharks. The problem is, if I'm winning, I'm getting tossed in with the sharks anyway.
None of what I've described is necessarily illegal. If you wanted to get me going on the illegal stuff, I could go on all day about the mismanagement and outright fraud that I've witnessed personally. If you're hell bent on trading FX, choosing a broker operating under a reputable regulator drastically reduces your odds of falling victim to this and gives you some recourse in the rare event it does.
> amazed anyone put in any effort to make the Metatrader product look pretty. There's 0 money in it. The existing market does NOT like change.
The industry absolutely does hate change, but that includes their trading platform so there will probably be a market for MT4 trading tools and integrations for a while yet. Every effort is being made to kill it and get people using MT5 instead but there are still plenty of holdouts. MT5 will win eventually, but lots of people will have to be dragged kicking and screaming.
> most brokerages have code running to prevent their clients from developing a strategic advantage for that reason.
I know of a few things which might be described this way but I'm also curious what you're referring to specifically.
Click bait - thought the post was about the ripple effect of the ever inflating cost of undergrad and grad degrees through society. Instead it's a reactionary piece to the current push for more political correctness in academia.
Yeah the title could be updated to more accurately reflect the content but I still enjoyed the discussion and (for me at least) a new online debate format
You're missing many other ways how we (America) subside driving I.E. how much of our armed forces (especially the Navy) have been built out and utilized post WWII to ensure a steady stream of oil.
On a side note, that would be an interesting PhD dissertation - figuring out the actual cost of America's car-centric lifestyle broken down locally, state and nationally.
Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil for itself.
The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now. Everyone in the industry says it is only a matter of time before the US will be able to produce all the oil the US needs. Whether that happens next year or 5 years from now depends on pricing and production decisions made by the OPEC producers.
I wouldn't be surprised if in 8 or 10 years the US will be in a position to guarantee a steady supply of oil to one of its strategic partners: the UK or Japan, say.
But this has thread has gotten off track because like grandparent already pointed out, Amtrak run on oil, too. I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables
> Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil. The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now.
There's more to it than that.
first, oil is a commodity product traded around the world, so, say, if Indonesian (offshore) oilfields go offline, china will simply buy from the saudis, which will drive up the price of Saudi oil and encourage US producers to export instead. Now rising price encourages local production, but most of it can't be switched on and off in a instant.
And in fact they already both import and export; for example tar sands "oil" from Canada is removed with a shovel, not a pipe. Refining it is very expensive (and energy demanding) so only gets mined when the price of oil is high enough to justify it. Currently the US exports about as much oil as it imports.
Lots of great stats on this topic from the Energy Information Administration (though some of the important statistics stopped being collected last year, alas). Here is the petroleum import & export page: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
What you write is relevant to the price of oil, which is a tangent from what we were talking about, namely, ensuring a supply of oil in chaotic circumstances, e.g., closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is itself a tangent from the original topic of Amtrak versus highways (since as GGGP already pointed out, Amtrak runs on oil, too).
But OK, let's talk about price. There's probably a 100 years worth of 'tight' oil just in Texas that can be produced for the price oil currently sells for. In other words, the cost of fracking that oil has decreased a lot. (And that oil is easier to refine than the stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia.)
> "I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables"
It's probably the other way around. The highways (ie: cars and trucks) will gradually convert to electric in the coming decades as the vehicle fleet is replaced and old equipment is retired.
On the other hand, electrifying long-distance rail requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure investment. Battery electric technology may mean that cost comes down, however (perhaps you only need wires on intermittent sections of track).
