Agreed. As for reference materials, you missed the key point that they tend to go out of date. An outdated reference book is largely useless, in contrast to a good novel.
> What they don't tell you right away is that there's no end to the stuff
Is there an end to any field worth studying? I would argue the allure of studying such fields lies in the endless horizons. The possibilities of expanding human knowledge by pushing beyond what is known.
It's been my experience that they do prepare chicken ahead of time. I've always seen trays of cooked chicken sitting under heat lamps. Also, I'm not sure about your last point. I eat at Popeyes about once a month and have never felt that their service was any different from any other fast food establishment.
I don't believe true crypto HFT strategies exist (i.e. sub-millisecond tick to trade). It's just not possible with websockets and http requests being the standard for data feeds and order placement on crypto exchanges.
> Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges.
Could you elaborate on this statement? It is my understanding that the value market markers provide is liquidity and tighter spreads. Worst case, they pull orders when informed volume is detected, but then the book is no worse off than what it would be if the market makers weren't there.
Not OP, but I think of jobs like theirs as being about marginal utility - how much better off is the world if trades are executed .001 seconds faster? It seems that for a lot of jobs the answer is not at all.
Yes they provide liquidity. But that is not the reason traders become market makers.
The liquidity is something that the exchanges want so they can provide better services to their other users / customers.
What the market makers get in return is some privileges on the exchange, such as favorable credit exempts or short sale treatments. This depends on the exchange.
But being a marketmaker, basically obliging to be able to quote a price on anything and everything, is regarded as much as a nuisance as it is a benefit.
Liquidity reduces the cost of trading for everyone, which is something you can just empirically verify. What do we care what someone's motivation for doing it is? Presumably everyone's motivation in finance is to make money.
I would advise against Google's python course, as it is geared toward python devs working at Google. The course teaches Python 2, and goes against widely accepted guidelines such as PEP-8.
I highly recommend David Beazley's Python Cookbook (https://www.dabeaz.com/cookbook.html) for the most idiomatic and comprehensive introduction to Python.
Suppose wash trading is indeed occurring, what is the benefit to the perpetrator? Fees are 0.20% for both maker and taker on Kraken. You'd have to pay ~$52,000 to print a $13 million trade.
Let's assume a third-party manipulator (i.e. they can't print new Tether).
To make this economical, they would need an in with at least one exchange. Their trades on this venue (let's call it ShadyBit) would be free, or close to it. This is where the majority of their wash trades happen. If one naïvely averages volume across the market, this will do the trick.
But the jig will fall apart if another exchange starts sharply diverging. So you set up sock puppet accounts there to soak up excess demand. As long as you keep the confidence game balanced, there shouldn't be too many people looking to sell at unusually low prices.
In the meantime, you can continue using your inflated-value tokens as collateral for borrowing or to buy appreciating assets or to sell or whatnot.
If I understand your example correctly, you mean to say that wash trading can be used to inflate prices. This could be true if Tether was simply another no-name altcoin with abnormally large percentage volume on Kraken. However, Tether trades on the magnitude of a few billion USD daily[1]. $13 million is a drop in the bucket. And as the article states, the trade did not impact price.
Not to mention the fact that real traders would stop exchanging their crypto for USDT pretty darn quick if its price fell below £1USD on exchanges trading USD/USDT pairs for a sustained period. A lot of the genuine activity takes place only because people/bots are watching those relatively small volumes of USD/USDT exchanges and seeing a steady stream of USDT orders at $1.
But this isn't happening. Rather than being artificially inflated, the price of Tether stays at $1 (to three significant figures) on all the exchanges.
If the goal of the market manipulator is to artificially inflate the value of Tether to $1 (there are many reasons to believe the true value is less than $1) this would be an indication they are doing an extremely effective job of it.
