this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
171 points (82.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43945 readers
672 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Quite the opposite, western stock markets are highly regulated. What you saw was probably high frequency traders making a transaction that they were not allowed to make. Depending on markets and contracts they have very tight rules they need to adhere to, things like how many orders they can place in a day or in a second, how many they can cancel etc. If they mess up the transaction could be reversed and they'd regret doing so - mistake or not. Depending on the offence they could face fines or hours/days not allowed to trade (ie shitloads of money). These things DO get enforced.
If they just make a mistake, they have to suck it up, someone doesn't get their bonus that quarter. There is no rollback button.
The high frequency traders have specialized hardware that executes trades on nanosecond scale directly connected to exchange DRAM. They can make a trade on an asset and reverse it before anyone even knows it was a bad trade. Meanwhile the dumb money waits.