Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!decwrl!hplabs!hplabsz!taylor
From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.society
Subject: Re: Computers and the Stock Exchange
Message-ID: <1623@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 25 Feb 88 22:45:18 GMT
Sender: taylor@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT.
Lines: 26
Approved: taylor@hplabs

>>   I would like to take this opportunity to combat the myth that program
>>   trading was responsible for the stock market crash.  The biggest cause
>>   of the crash...is the practice of..."portfolio insurance".  
>
> Both these names are symptoms of the same problem.  Big institutions can
> transact a great deal of business suddenly by trading stocks, options,
> futures, and other financial instruments with computers.
>
> When a computer trade dumps a whole bunch of stocks on the market, individual
> market makers don't see the entire trade right away.

Whatever speed transactions take place at, the market makers don't see the
entire trade "right away".  Markets get on fine in spite of this.

Faster reactions by traders just make the market better.  It doesn't matter
if it's a human trader or a computer trader.

The problem is that certain major trading institutions have been engaging in
destabilizing trading practices.  (The people who have been doing so are the
ones who took the biggest losses in the crash, by the way.)  It is probably
the case that access to computers tempted those people to think they could
get away with those practices -- indeed, as long as they could react faster
than anybody else, and there weren't too many of them, they could.  But this
is the only way in which computer trading is the problem.

Frank Adams