From Martin Pitt
Your article on atomic time for high-speed trading (19 April, p 12) is the latest of many such pieces about mathematical and technical innovations in financial activities presented as if they were improvements.
Making money out of stock market fluctuations is a purely parasitic activity, sucking money from and destabilising the real economy. The so-called improvements just enable one parasite to rob us more quickly than its competitor.
A real improvement would be a legal end to the fiction that a finance house “owns” something for a millisecond or less, and a return to actual investment and proper trade.
Leeds, UK
