What Business is Wall Street In?

http://blogmaverick.com/2010/05/09/what-business-is-wall-street-in/

by peter123 • 16 years ago

94 34 16 years ago

mixmax2• 16 years ago

Cracker, not hacker, is what he means. Annoying mistake.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

I dunno, it seems to be "hacking" in the relevant sense of figuring out how a formal or mechanical system works and finding clever things to do based on that understanding (of which "exploiting weaknesses for profit" is one, though not necessarily the most interesting one). People here discuss "hacking fitness" or "hacking productivity" or whatever, so I don't see why "hacking the markets" is any worse of an analogy.

mixmax2• 16 years ago

I see it more as breaking the system in order to gain a financial advantage on someone elses behalf - which would be akin to cracking.

Your point is taken though.

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

The context in which Cuban uses it, though, seems to presume that any hacker will use his findings for illicit personal gain rather than for the benefit of the community.

Admittedly this is a bit pedantic, and I know the popular use of the term has come to imply black hat, but this is Hacker News!

ynniv• 16 years ago

Hackers like to differentiate blackhat from normal hacking. The article uses "hack" in the blackhat manner: seeking to cause damage for personal gain, and not openly discussing the exploits found.

Dilpil• 16 years ago

Which is the wiser way to deal with hackers:

Is it to enact hard to enforce ambiguous anti hacking laws, while at the same time individually patching each exploit with unrelated fixes?

Or is it to step back and analyze why a system has so much hackable complexity, and seek to fix the overarching issues that create security vulnerabilities?

I would much rather see fundamental suggestions about how to optimize the market for fairness from the ground up rather than patchwork fixes like the dollar a trade tax, or the 5 year tax break.

daniel-cussen• 16 years ago

My understanding is that game theory isn't there yet, so you can't do a first principles market approach. But one should still try to make things work better and more elegantly.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

It's also hard to really "design" markets in an overarching way; they tend to be nothing but formalizations of and patchwork fixes to various existing practices. The stock market, for example, is a formalization of the paper-stock-trades market with an attempt at improving transparency and reducing fraud; the commodities exchange market is similar for commodities, with the additional goal of providing a clearance mechanism to get counterparty risk out of the picture; etc.

ajg1977• 16 years ago

One of the best articles that's been written about the issues with today's wall street.

lotharbot3• 16 years ago

If Mark Cuban thinks the market is now all about exotic derivatives rather than buying stock in companies you believe in, he's listening to the wrong people. Commission-based brokers talk about exotic derivatives; Warren Buffet still talks about buy-and-hold.

The biggest wins and losses in day trading will come from exotic derivatives simply by their nature: they're highly leveraged bets. Those firms that create the vehicles to make those bets aren't "hackers", they're "Vegas". You ask for a bet against the housing market or for cattle, they set up a structure to let you make that bet, and you play the odds -- and you might beat the other betters in the market over the short term, but it's the house (taking its percentage off the top) that always wins long term. Mark Cuban is right to be uncomfortable playing that game.

Meanwhile, people like Warren Buffet continue to look for healthy companies that are underpriced and buy into them for the long term. Day-to-day the market might be driven by short-term bets, but over the course of 3 decades it's still driven by the fundamental health of companies. If anything, those who care about "the performance of specific companies and their returns" benefit from the fact that occasionally, as a result of day traders' bets, healthy companies' stocks get sold at bargain prices.

If you try to play Vegas' game, you'll probably get burned. But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns.

davidw2• 16 years ago

> But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns.

Why? There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on. To me it just seems like you're going to be the 'greater fool', unless you really go at it more or less as a job, with the associated time commitments.

lotharbot3• 16 years ago

> There are oodles of people doing the same thing, who have access to better information, have more experience, have better search/screening systems, and so on.

If you're playing the short-term investment game, all of those things matter hugely. It's a zero-sum game. In order to make money at it, you have to have a better system than the rest of the people playing -- just like making money on sports betting.

They don't matter nearly so much in the long term. Long-term investing isn't zero-sum; economies can grow, and your goal is to own a growing piece of the economy. There are oodles of people playing the long-term game, but the market is big enough that even I, with my relatively limited information, can make good solid investments.

Consider this a corollary to "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". The market can offer irrational bargains to such a degree that even once those with better information have had their fill, there's some left over for people like me.

mbateman• 16 years ago

Yeah, investing your money well is a serious time commitment. But saying one can't do it because other people do it too is like saying that you can't invest your money by buying and renting out houses, because there are professional realtors.

hristov• 16 years ago

I think what Mark Cuban is saying is that because of the way Wall Street operates now it is very dangerous to be the Warren Buffet type of value investor.

More specifically, Wall Street's obsession with the big score makes stocks very dangerous and volatile which means that if you try investing based on a company's intrinsic value, the stock you buy can easily swing down for reasons that are completely unrelated to the company value but have to do with some traders or trading algorithms trying to outsmart each other.

Now if you are Buffet you probably have enough cash reserves to ride out any such swings, but most people need to rely on the money in their stock holdings, so they cannot afford the new found volatility of Wall Street, so many people are just moving out of the market all together.

Now I have to say that I am not sure if this argument is right, but that is his argument.

lotharbot3• 16 years ago

> "it is very dangerous to be the Warren Buffet type of value investor." ... "most people need to rely on the money in their stock holdings"

If you need to rely on the money from the sale of your stock holdings, you're not a Warren Buffet type of value investor. If you're looking for income from your holdings (dividends and such), the volatility of Wall Street's stock pricing algorithms is not an issue.

For those who are nearing retirement and counting on the sale of stock holdings, make sure you have an appropriate stock-bond-short term reserve mix in your portfolio so that you can ride out market swings. Moving out of the market altogether is unnecessary. If you do move out of the market in desperation (like people did in March of last year, selling for whatever they could get), you're providing us value investors the "irrational bargains" I mentioned in my reply to davidw.

nandemo• 16 years ago

I still don't think Cuban knows what he's talking about. For starters, the financial market's function is not to "create capital". There are several other odd claims and unsupported arguments in that article.

But in his defense, I don't think he even mentioned "exotic derivatives". Exotics are just derivatives that aren't "vanilla" (standard put or call options, etc). They don't have to be any more leveraged than a standard call option or a futures contract.

>If you try to play Vegas' game, you'll probably get burned. But if you stand back, watch the game, and buy when their game creates a bargain price on good long-term stocks, you stand to get very solid returns.

When a stock is dropping a lot (like it happened the other day with several stocks), you usually can't tell if it's really a "bargain". In hindsight it's easy to say that some stocks were a bargain a few days ago, but at that moment it would be risky to buy them. It could be that the companies were really in trouble.

For instance, even as Lehman stock was dropping, some people were buying it. Another example: this year, Japan Airlines (JAL) went bankrupt. It had been in trouble for some time, but as usual for airline companies, the government was propping it and most people didn't believe it could go down.

code_duck• 16 years ago

I believe he did recognize that distinction, actually, when he said that traders are not investors, and vice versa.

sireat• 16 years ago

Problem with the long game is that it can be a very long game indeed, and then not only you are dead, but the market is still irrational.

If you read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscences_of_a_Stock_Operat... you will notice that people like Warren Buffet have always been in the minority, as much as people hate to admit it, there is always that element of speculation in their investing.

The problem, according to Mark Cuban(and I will agree here), that there has been too much emphasis on the creating leveraged bets, and skimming in HFT, and not enough emphasis on capital creation for companies new(read - startups) and old.

borism• 16 years ago

There will be another crash, because there are too many players looking for the trillion dollar score. They can’t all win, yet how many do you think wouldn’t risk everything, even what is not theirs, for that remote chance to score big ? Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn’t traders take the biggest risk possible ?

well I'm sorry, but that also applies to VC/angel funded startups game nowadays, which Cuban participates in.

thefahim• 16 years ago

Very constructive.

gruseom3• 16 years ago

I disagree. Angels and VCs make money by investing in people who build great companies. What do derivatives traders build?

arethuza• 16 years ago

It could be argued that derivatives traders are simply satisfying a market requirement - what about the folks who buy these things not really understanding what it is they are getting into, even though they are investment "professionals".

yummyfajitas3• 16 years ago

Derivatives traders build ways for great companies to hedge risk. They also push the price of assets towards their correct value, allowing the price in the present to reflect information on the future.

jteo• 16 years ago

I disagree. Derivative traders provide financial instruments to hedge risk. What do angels and VCs do? Finance companies that scam online users. http://techcrunch.com/2009/11/07/horrible-things-slink-back-...

libber• 16 years ago

I would like to be shown I am wrong because it seems like an oversight but the answer to his main question is "the bond market" right?

DanielBMarkham• 16 years ago

Put another way, there is zero moral hazard attached to any trade. So why wouldn’t traders take the biggest risk possible ?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who somehow says and types the exact opposite to what I meant to say.

Mark means there is a maximum amount of moral hazard -- the brokers have completely different interests than the principals. If there were zero moral hazard, that would be a good thing.

xxzz• 16 years ago

"I have always thought I had a good handle on the market. Until recently."

Guess what? That just means that the market has gotten more efficient so that you can't arbitrage it anymore. If you can't make money, that your problem. If the quants made the market so irrational then why aren't you profitable arbitraging it?

All technologies improve the average case at the expense of making the worst case worse. Cars versus walking for example. Average case: get to where you are going faster, worst case: horrible accident. The question is not whether financial innovation introduces systemic risk but whether the benefits out-weigh the costs. The consensus amongst academic is that yes, this is the case.

MLnick• 16 years ago

This article is at best inconsistent, at worst self-serving.

Funny that Cuban wasn't complaining about traders when they were driving up tech stocks in the dot-com bubble that eventually helped him land his giant payout in Yahoo stock. Or the traders that took said Yahoo stock off of him when he wanted to divest himself (aka liquidity).

Tax breaks for long-term investors? Well VC and PE firms are "long-term investors" and they already have a pretty sweet deal on carried interest. That didn't stop them from rampant speculation in the tech bubble, or buying companies at outrageous debt multiples in the credit bubble. Imagine how much more it would have gone on if they didn't have to factor tax into their return calculations? I bet Mark would love to get all his future speculative VC investment payouts tax free. I don't know of a major tax regime that doesn't treat short-term trading revenue as income as opposed to capital gains. Tax breaks for "real long-term investment"? Yes, it's called a 401k or pension plan. If you're really a long-term investor a 10% algo glitch (4% actual down day) shouldn't even register for you. You shouldn't even be looking at the market on more than an annual basis.

"The market has changed over the last 3 years" and is driven by macro issues? Yes we've been through a severe global recession driven by the bursting of a global credit bubble. Of course macro issues have dominated and volatility has been extremely high.

(The wider) Wall Street's business is not and never was purely raising capital for companies. In the 20s were market volumes way less than capital raised as a proportion? I doubt it, but even if so it sure didn't prevent the Great Crash. Why does government need to further incentivise capital raising, that already brings in some of the highest possible fees (on individual transactions) to investment banks of any "traditional" activity (equity and debt underwriting, M&A, market making), i.e. excluding principal business and super exotic trades. He also says that companies never go public anymore, yet global IPO volumes are the highest in a decade (http://www.efinancialnews.com/story/2010-03-26/global-ipo-q1).

The only point I really agree with is leverage - it fuels the growth of bubbles, and exacerbates their bursting (or causes it when taken away in some cases). Most of the major bubbles/crashes in the past 100 years were either caused by excessive leverage (credit bubble, LTCM, various debt and currency crises) or had leverage as a major feature in their bursting and the speed and volatility of the movements (dot-com, Great Crash, credit bubble). The possible exception to this is '87 (to a large extent computer-driven, arguably) although again leverage played a big role.

Finally, the major, unforeseen crashes have typically come about due to opaque, illiquid and/or highly leveraged situations (AIG, LTCM, CDS on CDOs, day traders buying tech stocks on margin etc). High-frequency traders only trade in the most liquid instruments, so ironically they are the ones trading on exchange, transparently and with exchange-set collateral and trading rules. Certainly illegal activities such as real front-running should be stamped out. Possibly things like flash orders too. A level playing field should be ensured. But he should worry more about the stuff going on off exchange than in the public markets.

known• 16 years ago

Wall Street should give priority for investors over traders.

What Business is Wall Street In?

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