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I never buy at market. I think you should always use limit orders and I can't even remember the last time I placed an order at market. The biggest way to beat the HFTs though is just to stop doing any kind of short-term trading. They manipulate prices over seconds, not over days or weeks or months.
I wouldn't worry about HFT though, that whole thing has been a bit overblown. Doesn't directly impact your trades, unless you're day trading. Besides, once HFT stops ripping us off, we're still going to get ripped off by the brokers, and in fact will probably get ripped off by that "hero" from RBC they've parading all over the media. This notion that he's trying to bring fairness to the market out of his sense of morality is ... laughable. I almost spit out my drink when I watched the Bloomberg interview. RBC is drumming up business for their spinoff exchange and all the big banks are probably supporting it, since big banks are suffering due to HFT and want to see them get shut down.
Don't kid yourselves. RBC and the other big banks are not looking out for us. They have prop trading divisions, and their brokerage arms make tons of money by betting against us and skimming money out of our orders, etc. Why do you think they drive fancy cars, live in expensive mansions and have 500k to 1 mil bonuses? You don't make that kind of money just by simply serving customer orders fairly. OBVIOUSLY!
Reality check: the RBC guy in the story isn't a hero. He may have a bit more integrity than the HFT people, but this is like comparing malaria to tapeworm. They're both bad news
I wouldn't worry about HFT though, that whole thing has been a bit overblown. Doesn't directly impact your trades, unless you're day trading. Besides, once HFT stops ripping us off, we're still going to get ripped off by the brokers, and in fact will probably get ripped off by that "hero" from RBC they've parading all over the media. This notion that he's trying to bring fairness to the market out of his sense of morality is ... laughable. I almost spit out my drink when I watched the Bloomberg interview. RBC is drumming up business for their spinoff exchange and all the big banks are probably supporting it, since big banks are suffering due to HFT and want to see them get shut down.
Don't kid yourselves. RBC and the other big banks are not looking out for us. They have prop trading divisions, and their brokerage arms make tons of money by betting against us and skimming money out of our orders, etc. Why do you think they drive fancy cars, live in expensive mansions and have 500k to 1 mil bonuses? You don't make that kind of money just by simply serving customer orders fairly. OBVIOUSLY!
Reality check: the RBC guy in the story isn't a hero. He may have a bit more integrity than the HFT people, but this is like comparing malaria to tapeworm. They're both bad news