I was going to mention HFT. How is it a level playing field when they are in the picture? Paying top dollar just to be closer and closer to the exchanges to get the fastest, "best price", when really, they have info before anyone else.
Also, what about dark pools?
Contrary to my username, which I just get a kick out of, I don't actually work on wall street or anything, but I've always felt the stock market was rigged for the elite. I think it is very likely that they have info before normal retail investors have any idea.
HFT is the best thing to ever happen to the average Joe retail investor. They have increased liquidity and price discovery dramatically at a fraction of the cost of the people they replaced.
At what cost are they providing this service though? They make a ridiculous amount of money doing so. Shouldn't the exchanges have offered the best price, and provided liquidity, in the first place?
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis painted HFT in a pretty bad way. I have read criticisms of the book, but it's hard to separate out bias from the criticism.
There's also all the heat on Robinhood about selling order flow, which I'm surprised was even news to regular investors. It's great they eliminated fees for normal trades, and I also understand most major brokerages sell order flow as well (and still charged for trades for a long time). I read that Fidelity is the only major player that doesn't sell order flow.
Do you have some sources that someone could learn more about this, ones that don't have a vested interest in painting it in a positive way?
Also, I'm still wondering, considering dark pools [1], and the inside information that would come along with that, since those trades wouldn't hit public markets, how the stock markets can be considered a fair place to trade?
> They make a ridiculous amount of money doing so.
I suppose it depends on how you define ridiculous, but HFTs actually make a surprisingly small amount of money these days. Probably single digit billions across the entire industry (https://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/34856/how-much-pro...), though 2020 was an exceptional year for many firms.
> Shouldn't the exchanges have offered the best price, and provided liquidity, in the first place?
Either your wording is a little funny, or this question indicates great ignorance about how trading works. Exchanges do not provide liquidity, market makers do. In 2021, "HFT" ~= "market maker".
I don't know that much about this, so you could chalk it up to "great ignorance", I suppose.
I'm a software engineer, interested in crypto, and not that involved in traditional markets (except for holding an S&P 500 index fund).
I do think the exchanges in traditional finance shouldn't have required HFTs in the first place (i.e. it's an antiquated technology). I also think hedge funds and the ultra rich have privileged info, that retail investors don't have.
Anyway, I appreciate the clarification. I like learning about all this.
> I'm a software engineer, interested in crypto, and not that involved in traditional markets
As you learn more about crypto and traditional finance, it'll be fun to compare the two. Your confusion about the role of an exchange in traditional finance might be because you see the crypto world, where a single entity often performs the roles that many entities perform in traditional finance (exchange, clearing firm, broker, etc.).
> I do think the exchanges in traditional finance shouldn't have required HFTs in the first place (i.e. it's an antiquated technology)
I'm not quite sure what this means, but it's important to understand that HFTs exist in the crypto space as well. Capital markets don't function particularly well without marker makers, and absent some rule explicitly preventing high speed trading, marker makers will tend towards being the fastest traders in any market.
> As you learn more about crypto and traditional finance, it'll be fun to compare the two. Your confusion about the role of an exchange in traditional finance might be because you see the crypto world, where a single entity often performs the roles that many entities perform in traditional finance (exchange, clearing firm, broker, etc.).
Yes, I agree!
In terms of what I called antiquated technology, I think there are a lot of layers on traditional finance, and a lot has changed since its beginnings. I think crypto will go through a similar evolution, in terms of tech, regulation, etc. I think we're in the very early stages for crypto and it has a chance to be an even better system.
I do know that HFTs exist in crypto, and it still is the wild west in some ways, but in the end I like that innovation is happening and that there are alternatives to existing systems.
That said, I appreciate all the responses and I'll take some time to learn more about traditional markets.
Crypto volume is pretty hft/market maker weighted as well.
There’s just not
a. Enough random interested parties willing to buy/sell various coins so that you have low-spread and liquid markets
b. Non-hft players who keep crypto markets in line with each other
This isn’t super surprising. Managing posted liquidity is a difficult task that sort of requires being halfway to a market maker, and naturally most non-market makers just want to buy and sell right away instead of posting orders and waiting/hoping.
The result of this is that most liquidity is provided by HFTs, since they’re the only party that can and even wants to have a bunch of bids/offers out for you to trade against.
Today's crypto has the same issues: the fastest decision-making computer with the shortest time to the network makes the block.
Just like cutting inches off mainframe cables, manufacturers of ASICs purpose-build computer chips for crypto. GPU operators tune their cards and even download new code to get every last bit of processing capability from their devices. Crypto in these ways is just like HFT.
Transferring data and calculating the core of a new block takes a fraction of a second, and then it takes an average of several minutes to find the right random numbers to finish the block.
A latency advantage in HFT lets you take most of the profits. A latency advantage in cryptocurrency mining gives you a fraction of a percent better profits.
A calculations-per-second advantage helps in mining, but it's strictly proportional.
> Transferring data and calculating the core of a new block takes a fraction of a second, and then it takes an average of several minutes to find the right random numbers to finish the block.
A PoW, say Bitcoin, is configured in the consensus algorithm to avoid duplicate spending. The fastest, correct miner for a block that communicates the quickest to the network will get the block.
I think you're very confused about how mining blocks works. It only takes microseconds to test a specific hash. Every miner is testing a different random bunch of numbers to see if they get a lucky result where the hash starts with enough 0 bits.
There's near-zero overlap between the numbers tested by different miners. So a latency advantage does not make you win. Everyone is picking lottery numbers in parallel. If three miners have the exact same hash rate, and one of them has a 2 second head start, then the one with the head start is only going to win 33.4% of the time.
You're making some incorrect assumptions about what I wrote, based upon somehow reading things I didn't write. I am intimately familiar with the bitcoin network. I never said that many miners simultaneously work on the same block. Don't worry, you aren't alone in the crypto world with making assumptions.
"The fastest, correct miner for a block that communicates the quickest to the network will get the block." is misleading at best and completely false at worst.
If I'm misinterpreting you, feel free to clarify, but to me it looks like you're saying that latency matters (more than a fraction of a percent) with cryptocurrency, and it does not matter.
And moreso, "the fastest decision-making computer with the shortest time to the network makes the block." is not true. Even if you mean "lucky" by "fastest", since the computer that finds a block doesn't have to be fast, 99+% of the time blocks are found far enough apart that time to network is irrelevant.
I meant that the flat system of crypto where (at least before industrial mining), people could spin up mining rigs (which is still possible, I think at least with some altcoins), but also, that the barrier to entry for folks trading crypto is lower than traditional markets. Some may chalk this up to the need for KYC/AML, but I think there are intentional barriers to entry for individuals that people in power don't want to have access to say, equity markets, that don't exist as much in crypto markets. I don't think crypto markets should be used to supplement terrorism, money laundering, tax avoidance, or anything else like that, but if you take a look at say, Robinhood, who tried to lower some of these barriers to entry to traditional markets, I think crypto as a whole is trying to do that. I also have said in other posts, and will continue to, that blockchain analytics will only continue to get more advanced, so the narrative that crypto is only used for illegimate activity is bullshit. I do think that it is a power to the people that can't be stopped, due to its decentralized nature, and that it is the only possibility I've seen so far as an alternative to everything else going on that requires sovereign government policy and currencies (that are backed by war, control, etc).
I'd like to recommend the book "trading at the speed of light". It's an in depth look at the world of high frequency trading based on first hand interviews with traders, court documents, etc. It would appear based on what little information is actually available that HFT firms net only modest profits after taxes and fees on trades. Historically, it appears most firms fail to turn a profit and shut down. A paper of Laughlin (2014) suggests virtu, a hft firm that now executes Robinhood orders, earns an estimate profit of 0.24 cents per trade, with 0.05 to 0.1 cents per share traded being a respectable profit.
I highly recommend this book though if your into this topic
> I was going to mention HFT. How is it a level playing field when they are in the picture? Paying top dollar just to be closer and closer to the exchanges to get the fastest, "best price", when really, they have info before anyone else.
Apologies if my post implied insider knowledge on the part of HFTs. That's not the case.
The point I was making is their model is ONLY viable if they have the best mathematical brains, the best computing power, the best connectivity. If anything in that fragile chain is broken then their model is unviable.
In the end, they trade on what is best described as noise. They look for patterns in the noise. And so they need "the best" noise, as soon as instantly as they can get it, and the computing power to process it as close to instantly as possible.
I called it "another story" because its a truly nuts way of making money. ;-)
There is an old saying. "Time in a trade is better than timing a trade". HFTs are basically trying to do the latter all day, every day.
In my view, John Doe the buy & hold investor actually has the advantage that they can wait for weeks, months or years.
> Paying top dollar just to be closer and closer to the exchanges to get the fastest, "best price"
Being able to send an order with a smaller latency does not magically get you a "better price".
99.9999% of the market participants couldn't care less if their orders arrived 1ms or 1m after they send it. Hell, most hedge funds trade on a _daily_ basis, with multiple days of expected returns predictions, and are more concerned with the transaction cost than the latency, thus opting for a very slow "market close price" execution algo.
Those interested with very low latency are not hedge funds but market makers, and the kind of microstructure signals they exploit is not only orthogonal to what a retail investor would do, but often brings in just bips per trade, meaning the leverage required to make it worth it is anyway out of the retail league.
> I think it is very likely that they have info before normal retail investors have any idea.
What is a normal retail investor? Obviously hedge funds are going to be faster to react to e.g. earnings events than you. That doesn't mean this information is not public. It's just that HF pay data providers, invest in automatic data processing and decision making, etc.
But normal retail investors don't trade on events, they trade for the long term. For the simple reason that they don't want to hit refresh every second on the web page publishing earnings calls of each stock they want to buy.
> what about dark pools?
Yes, what about them? The name triggers the imagination of people but there's really nothing fancy about it. The objective of dark pools is to allow the exchange of shares without too much of a movement in the orderbook. This is actually good for both users of dark pool (they get lower slippage) and users of the public market (it prevents artificial big swings in price due to large buyouts, which would be announced anyway). The liquidity at time T in the order book is not tailored to absorb any ridiculous amount that a large investor could be willing to exchange.
> Shouldn't the exchanges have offered the best price, and provided liquidity, in the first place?
What does that even mean? The exchanges don't offer price by themselves, they just reflect what participants are willing to pay or receive. They are just middlemen facilitating the exchange of goods by publishing the order book of who's willing to buy/sell and at which price.
The exchanges also cannot magically provide liquidity out of thin air. Liquidity means there is someone real on the other end of your trade that is willing to buy or sell to you. Exchanges cannot create that artificially.
What exchanges do, though, is offer rebates to providers of liquidity (including the market makers that you seem to despise) in exchange for the liquidity they provide. This is not a random decision by the exchange, it's because providing liquidity to the market is beneficial for everyone. As an investor, it means I won't have to worry that I will not be able to sell my shares whenever I want to. It also means that the spread will be tighter, thus lowering my slippage. And subsequently, it also means arbitrage is most likely in place, so I'm not being scammed just because I didn't check the price on 5 different platforms.
> Those interested with very low latency are not hedge funds but market makers, and the kind of microstructure signals they exploit is not only orthogonal to what a retail investor would do, but often brings in just bips per trade, meaning the leverage required to make it worth it is anyway out of the retail league.
Thanks for clarifying.
> What is a normal retail investor? Obviously hedge funds are going to be faster to react to e.g. earnings events than you. That doesn't mean this information is not public. It's just that HF pay data providers, invest in automatic data processing and decision making, etc.
Well, this is sort of what I'm saying. As a regular person, you just don't have the same information, or the ability to act on it as quickly. Sure, buy and hold investors aren't really affected, but they are providing liquidity for these folks who can take some advantage. I may be pretty wrong about this, however, it's just like anything where there are friends / contacts / associates. Some parties just have more information, especially if they have money to spend. You did mention earnings though. I just have a hard time believing that hedge funds only act on public information. They might structure their trades based on how not to get flagged, but how do they not have friends or contacts in the space that tell them a thing or two? This is what they are doing full time, so I would imagine they spend a good majority of their time thinking about how to make the most money and not raise any red flags. I actually don't have an issue with this, but I always see claims that the traditional market is totally fair, but it does not seem like a very flat system to me. Those in power seem to have some advantage. If that was how the market was presented (i.e. some people have sway, more information, and the ability to act more quickly than retail), I wouldn't have any issue with this. I see the opposite though, the narrative is that retail traders can make trades without worrying because it's totally equal. If all retail traders were doing was buy and hold, then again, no issue, but not all retail traders trade that way.
> Yes, what about them? The name triggers the imagination of people but there's really nothing fancy about it. The objective of dark pools is to allow the exchange of shares without too much of a movement in the orderbook. This is actually good for both users of dark pool (they get lower slippage) and users of the public market (it prevents artificial big swings in price due to large buyouts, which would be announced anyway). The liquidity at time T in the order book is not tailored to absorb any ridiculous amount that a large investor could be willing to exchange.
Where do I learn more about dark pools? My initial response to learning about them was that they are basically tailored to hide trades from the general public, for the benefit of institutional traders. I was concerned that dark pool operators would also have information that then they could front-run the rest of the market with. I feel like when I make a trade in the equity markets, or if I read something in traditional news, someone else has heard about this earlier that day, or maybe days before, based on insider information, just due to them being more deeply involved with the market. I just don't really see how this is fair (and this is the claim I see time and time again in traditional markets). I don't think all this information is public. If it's in some obscure place, that 95% of the investing public doesn't see, is it really public? Maybe the SEC protects against that, but it seems like the big players have an advantage. It seems like I have a lot of incorrect assumptions though, so I'd like to learn more about this.
> What exchanges do, though, is offer rebates to providers of liquidity (including the market makers that you seem to despise) in exchange for the liquidity they provide. This is not a random decision by the exchange, it's because providing liquidity to the market is beneficial for everyone. As an investor, it means I won't have to worry that I will not be able to sell my shares whenever I want to. It also means that the spread will be tighter, thus lowering my slippage. And subsequently, it also means arbitrage is most likely in place, so I'm not being scammed just because I didn't check the price on 5 different platforms.
Yeah, I get it, this is a quite mature market (and that's a good thing). I still have a feeling that the extremely powerful have sway in the market, in a way that isn't exactly "fair", but maybe it just comes down to the amount of capital they have (but again, I would think that the size of the trades should be on public markets then, not dark pools). Anyway, in the end, what I've learned from all this is how far the traditional markets have come, and how other markets (like crypto, which also have things like dark pools) can learn from this.
> Well, this is sort of what I'm saying. As a regular person, you just don't have the same information, or the ability to act on it as quickly.
Well the general idea is that everyone have the possibility of getting the information at the same time. The difference is how fast you can react, which seems fair to me.
To be frank, hedge funds, especially quantitative ones, are usually not the fastest to respond to earnings. The lifecycle of earnings announcements often roughly goes like that:
- Company X releases its earnings on the SEC website. This usually happens once the market is closed (~6pm) so that people have until the next morning to digest it, and avoid dubious ultra fast reactions. The publication date was already announced so everyone know it's coming.
- The next morning at market open, some (few) investors already place trades based on the earnings published. Most of the time, these are human decisions made by financial analysts experts on company X that read the earnings, because systematic funds seldomly trade on unstructured data such as PDF reports.
- an earnings calls takes place the next morning also, so that financial analysts can ask questions and clarifications about the figures to company X. Right after, the wav/mp3 of the call is uploaded (often on the company website). Some more investor do trade based on the earnings call, either by financial analysts listening to it, but more and more just by reading the transcripts. Some (few) hedge funds apply NLP to parse the transcripts at that point, and trade based on the results.
- The next day, major data providers (think Reuters/Refinitiv, Bloomberg, etc) have processed the transcripts to structured data. The major hedge funds all subscribe to these data providers, and are now able to start trading on the earnings event.
- The same day, Bloomberg releases an article about the earnings of company X and explains why its good, dedicated retail investors and non systematic hedge funds get interested and join the trade.
- for the next 10 days or so, more and more (slower) people will continue the trend on these earnings, until the price stabilizes to a market consensus. See PEAD - post earnings announcement drift - for more information.
This is more or less how it goes for earnings. Nothing strikes me as _unfair_ here. Everyone had the opportunity to put effort in reading the earnings. It's just a trade-off of convenience (i.e. I want structured data), price (i.e. I hire a financial analyst to interpret the earnings early), and R&D (i.e. I invested in NLP to parse transcripts) versus the speed of reaction to the event.
What could make it more fair for retail investors? Forbidding the use of financial analysts because they are more knowledgable than average Joe? Forbidding the use of NLP because average Joe does not know how to code?
> I just have a hard time believing that hedge funds only act on public information.
Oh but trust me they do. Now there will always be outliers, shaddy deals, etc. Any system with rules have cheaters. But that's definitely very very exceptional. This is especially true for non proprietary funds (funds managing money of other people - the vast majority), since the amount of scrutiny is huge.
Allow me to use myself as an example. I work in a hedge fund, though I deal mainly with operational / technical / quantitative matters. I have one of the lowest grade of surveillance level (MIC) which still entails:
- All my work phones are tapped (mobile and fix)
- All my work conversations are logged.
- I am forbidden from contacting anyone about professional or financial matters if the medium is not logged (i.e. No whatsapp, no signal,...)
- I am forbidden to invest in most asset classes. Except for equities, for which I need pre-approval of the trades 2 days in advance, and have a minimum holding period of 30 days. Compliance has access to my brokerage account, and reports on those of my close relatives.
- I am forbidden from giving any financial advice to anyone, even family or friends
- I am forbidden from receiving any financial research or counseling material from anyone, through any medium (mail, phone, conference) if the material is 1) free or 2) undeclared.
- I am forbidden from discussing or meeting with some people in the office, as well as walk in certain parts of it ("Chinese walls") , since screens could reveal information, or conversations could take place.
- At leat 15h of compliance / legal training per year.
- I am personally (not the company: myself) liable up to $10 millions (disclaimer: I don't have that kind of money) if any material incident happens that could be traced by me not setting up the proper mitigation. E. G. If a bug happens and I did not give the team the means to have catched it. Or the worst nightmare of MICs: if someone does some shaddy business, and I did not arrange for enough control or compliance training for him to know that it's illegal.
- The usual set of no paid gifts, trips, conference in fancy hotels or whatsnot.
- etc etc etc
Keep in mind that's not even the highest scrutiny level. So, yes, some people cheat, we see it in newspapers, but that's the 0.0001%
> Where do I learn more about dark pools?
I honestly don't know. This is really a detail of equity markets, each broker have a different one with different specificities. As for front running, this is IMHO something of the past (at least on equities, for major brokers). Clients are well aware of the risk and require huge amounts of compliance and processes on their brokers to prevent that, not even mentioning the regulators themselves. The reputation risk is just not worth it.
> My initial response to learning about them was that they are basically tailored to hide trades from the general public
Well that's true. But it's often because the purchase is too huge to be made public, it would disrupt the market for no reason. Think of what happens to crypto when a whale sells off, huge upswing followed by huge downswing, until the price settles back again,and in the meantime the investor got an awful slippage, people panicked, bit trade crazy stuff, etc.
I know dark pools trigger the imagination of journalists and retail, but there's really nothing fancy about them. Let's take a real world example to explain how they are used.
Every year, Apple reserves a portion of their profits to buy back some shares from the market, which they then destroy (I won't enter into the details of why they do that, it's a pretty common practice for growth companies). Apple does this every quarter, it amounts in 2021 to $20 billions of share buyback per quarter (~$80 billions last year). What would happen if Apple just goes on the market and places a fat $20 billion market order? It would be total chaos. With such a big order, the whole liquidity of the book would disappear, price would skyrocket, people shorting apple would receive insane margin calls, people long apple would be instant billionaires for a split second, volatility would cramp up and market dislocation would trigger, meaning the stock would have to be halted, trading bots would sell everything, Apple itself would be ruined to buy at such a large price, etc, etc, etc.
That's where the dark pool can be handy. Apple announces publicly the buyback amount and date (this is mandatory for public companies), and in exchange for a (often) slightly less good price, apple can perform its buyback on a dark pool where the price won't move, and nobody will panic.
I like crypto but the way I read this is that it's a good number of the reasons that the existing financial infrastructure is better (particularly once the US infrastructure updates to things like instant FedNow payments).
I think defaulting to using a mixer would be inconvenient and it could get folks flagged for even using it at all.
Also, what ever happened to not re-using addresses? I know it doesn't make it totally private, but I thought it helps some, since you'd still have to tie addresses to identities somewhere in the chain.
If you just top off your spending wallet occasionally, it doesn't necessarily have to be more inconvenient than visiting an ATM, or paying your credit card bill if you don't have it drafted automatically.
Seems to me that "getting folks flagged" for doing something innocent is a flaw in our government, more than a flaw in crypto.
Not reusing addresses helps against casual inspection but with blockchain analysis these days, it's long obsolete as any sort of real privacy measure. It wouldn't be something corporations could use to protect competitive information. Also it's not useful at all on account-based chains like Ethereum.
I think companies should still provide a way to link accounts via small deposits. It takes a few days, but at least you don't have to share your credentials. (This applies to US accounts, maybe there are better solutions elsewhere.)
If you use Plaid, I think it should only be if there's no other option and you change your credentials after. I've always thought giving away your credentials to a screen scraping company like Plaid was crazy.
In terms of the class action lawsuit, the only one who will see a meaningful payout from this are the lawyers.
Their UI makes it really hard to find this option though, because Plaid makes their money from scraping your transaction history, which doesn't work if you do the micro-transaction approach.
As a consumer, I'm not a big fan of Plaid's business model. But to be fair to them, a lot of the security issues come from the fact that until very recently, no US banks had any form of API to allow delegation of access. Based in large part on the success of Plaid, this is starting to change; some institutions are banning Plaid from using the password-based flow, and are replacing this with a more secure OAuth flow:
This is the correct solution to the technical problem at hand. It'll benefit other systems too; for example it should be possible for open-source accounting software to use this flow to export your transaction history in a maintainable way, which previously relied on scraping that's unfeasible for an OSS project to keep up with (but which Mint could afford to implement).
Hopefully the banks let you selectively grant permissions "can view my account list" and "can view my transaction list", or at least surface those permissions, so that consumers can be aware of what they are giving away -- I'd wager that most end users have no idea that Plaid is slurping their transaction history, and would be even more shocked that it's maintaining ongoing access to continue doing the same.
If they are able to replace real world contracts one day, that could be a benefit, i.e. escrow and title transfer for real estate. They would need to be pretty complex to do so, since currently title companies track local laws and make sure everything is in order, but, stuff like this could automate some things which are done manually now. There also would probably need to be a way to have human intervention, i.e. being able to upgrade or sidestep the contracts, if something doesn't go as expected, but I still think automating this can modernize certain fields.
In my opinion, the process of buying / selling real estate, at least in the US, seems antiquated. There has to be some way to automate this instead of manually having some escrow company hold funds and then manually releasing them once the sale is complete, and issuing the title (gets more complicated if it's a mortgage vs a cash deal, since a bank loan would also be involved, but either way, it is possible). The smart contracts could be coded in a way where the funds are automatically released, and a title issued, once certain criteria are met. One risk is that the smart contracts could be hacked, but over time the code could be become more solid.
It seems that as a whole the world will move more to automation, over time, and smart contracts might play a part in that. That said smart contracts that can't really be stopped could also become Skynet or something (i.e. Terminator), but I don't think fear of that should prevent us from exploring the possibilities. My point is that smart contracts could automate certain things that are done manually now. They might still require some human involvement, but the amount of human involvement required could be dramatically reduced. I don't think the main benefit of smart contracts is just that they are unregulated. I also don't think that the way smart contracts are used today are the only ways they can be used. It is a new field and many things that folks haven't even thought of yet are possible with this type of technology.
I think it would be worth understanding how Bitcoin works first. It's designed to be more robust. It doesn't change as often (some criticize it due to that), however, it could also be seen as a strength. You could read the Bitcoin white paper [1]. If you wanted to learn more about programming Bitcoin, you could also check out Mastering Bitcoin 2nd Edition - Programming the Open Blockchain by Andreas M. Antonopoulos [2].
Ethereum was created after Bitcoin. It was designed to be more of an open programming platform. It was designed to be Turing Complete and enabled the use of "smart contracts". The DeFi space runs on smart contracts and Ethereum kicked off DeFi. This is the Ethereum white paper [3]. Mastering Ethereum by Andreas M. Antonopoulos & Gavin Wood is another book you could check out [4].
Here are a couple of introductions to DeFi, as well [5][6].
The hack that everyone is discussing here was on Poly Network, which a layer 2 solution for Ethereum [7]. Layer 2 solutions were created due to lower the high gas fees on Ethereum, as well as increase transaction throughput. Ethereum itself is also working on moving to Ethereum 2.0 which would help address the issues that layer 2 solutions are trying to solve [7].
Edit: Poly Network actually appears to be more of a bridge between different networks (Ethereum, Polygon and Binance Smart Chain) [9], so it's worth noting that this wasn't a direct hack on Polygon, which is a layer 2 solution for Ethereum.
They later moved off of Yodlee to Intuit APIs, post acquisition, although those also do screen scraping [2], and thus carry the same risks.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1537825
[2] https://money.cnn.com/2010/12/02/pf/mint_leaves_yodlee/