we had such a tax until St. Ronnie the Demented decided to "free" the market.

This are the ass-hats that are spewing fake trades into the "system" to probe prices and immediately withdrawing the trades.

Can you imagine them having to spend 2 cents to do these automated, millions-of-time-per-day transactions.

Poor Boys....

Oh, Ronnie The Demented was just a puppet with a hand up his rear.

You may want to see this Guardian article i just posted. It's the first
piece I've seen that's looking at bigger picture, how it's all connected,
and current "fear & uncertainty" on Wall St.
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jul/09/us-china-markets-volatility-greece-puerto-rico

A very small tax on each trade would not affect normal investors, but would be a strong disincentive to the high-speed high-volume traders. The high-speed trading has nothing to do with investment, it is purely speculative and, as you say, potentially extremely dangerous to the market.

In the United States in 2009, high-frequency trading firms represented 2% of the approximately 20,000 firms operating today, but accounted for 73% of all equity orders volume.

On September 2, 2013, Italy became the world's first country to introduce a tax specifically targeted at HFT, charging a levy of 0.02% on equity transactions lasting less than 0.5 seconds.

for pennies on the dollar. It is scary how well this works and how little people care.

but it has never gained traction or come up for a vote.

If Bernie is the nominee and keeps talking about this, maybe it will. But we will probably need a very different House if this is to pass.

Hoping for coattails...

1.5%. Pretty sure it's going to fall back to 12,000 in October (which is typically the month the market falls worst). I'll get back in then.

25% of stocks trading so I don't see how any slowdown will work.

IMO, these were cyber attacks yesterday and we will not find out the scope for about 10yrs.

Our biggest problem is getting corporations to pay attention and take cyber hacking seriously.

i was not aware there was such a thing.

And that the "self-regulated" exchanges are controlled by the same people that trade/own seats.

Sort of like the American Medical Association not wanting to publish statistics on how often each one of its members causes harm/death.

And ultimately that's the most important thing.

Would their act first to:

1. Protect their jobs and absolve themselves of accountability

or

2. Protect the profits of their owners


Probably both, with an emphasis on the latter.

kind of like finally removing that lamprey on a fish that it is trying to suck dry.
If we really want to fix things and not just temporarily, let people buy bonds from companies that they must hold for a certain amount of time. All those wall st. types could get new jobs as minimum wage clerks selling the bonds.
This would eliminate the fast trading. It would make sure that companies were committed to growth, not just improving stock prices for CEOs and wealthy investors and if they were guarenteed by the govt., they'd provide safe investments for people at all economic levels.
This way the greed of the few would never affect the rest of us.
Again, I'm not an economist, but is there a reason this wouldn't work other than it would be difficult to ever get passed as law?

At least for now.

Perhaps if we have another '29 style melt-down where all these self-important Wall Street, K Street, Penn Ave. types actually lose their net worth, perhaps then they'll be some more reform.

Reform for a while. Until the scavengers/sharks start to prey upon the economy once again.

200 point drop in a few seconds to a minute to the computer systems they have and the algorithm trading they do is an Eon in human time.

It took them 3 hours to unspool a bad software package (if we're to believe the official story). They have no control over the robots. None.

This is the 2nd time since 2009 that something like this happened. Its a matter of time before some huge technical blow up happens... again. Sooner or later it will be the "big one" and devastate the markets.

It worked so well for them last time, they made out like bandits. Why wouldn't they want to try it again? Can't let those uppity workers actually make a living now, can they? They want us poor and ignorant so we work for nothing.

The government folks have been practically begging for the opportunity to let this happen, that's why they aren't implementing the Financial Controls that were passed years and years ago. That's why too big too fail has gotten way worse.

that if some regulation could be passed which limited changes in stock prices to once per second (software should be able to do that easily) then it could slow down the trading and ease the strain on the technology.

Honestly, once per second would not be that bad. It would really screw the guys trading stocks on the millisecond scale, but for the rest of us it would be fine.

If only it could be done.

Infrastructure repairs... take your pick. Maybe all of that.

Plus it we would slow down the transactions. Win win

kick in after a certain percentage drop in a specified time. trading stops for a specified amount of time. sorry i cannot give those exact numbers, but they are out there, and they do kick in.

and believe me, the price for lying in public for the nyse is steep. very, very steep. they are not in the habit of doing that.