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How come? Why do they have to take the profits out and can’t compound it?

I know literally zero about this stuff!



The simplistic explanation is, if you're doing arbitrage - i.e. "fixing market mispricing", there's only so much arbitrage you can do before you fix the price...

This is of course a completely theoretical proposition, because in reality you don't know what the "fair price" is. You don't even have probabilities, because those are also unobservable, you only see one version of "history".

In practice, what happens is that if you trade "too much", "shit goes wrong". Both of these things require empirical estimation and are easy to get wrong.

The most obvious is the market liquidity, which you can observe at e.g. BitStamp TradeView [1] - there's only so many orders at a given price, so the more you trade, the worse price you get (the average/marginal trade).

No professional of course trades like that, especially not HFTs, but similar problems happen at every scale - you're competing with other traders, they might have better information, there's limited amount of stock in the market, the edge/alpha/expected profit you can earn decays over time as the price moves, if you trade too much you move the market and inform other participants who can then trade against you, ...

[1] https://www.bitstamp.net/market/tradeview/


When you scale up too much it creates market impact that affects returns. You basically become too much of the market.


I know literally zero about this stuff!

I guess you will not be getting a job there

But in seriousness, when you become so big relative to the market, you become the market.




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